Art Center Sarasota is closing its 100th season with four exhibitions, including “Putting Breath in the Body,” by Antoine Williams. It includes a collection of mixed-media paintings, drawings, and collages that weave together Black Southern folklore, working-class sensibilities, personal history and the writings of influential artists and thinkers throughout the African diaspora.
“He is a professor at the University of Florida and he is going to be showing some magical realism paintings that are brand new and a new style of work for him,” remarked Art Center Sarasota Curator and Director of Exhibitions Christina Baril.
Williams creates layered figurative surrealist compositions that examine memory, identity, resilience and the power of communal care.
“He draws a lot from his experience growing up in the South,” Baril noted. “He also talks a lot in his work about African American folklore, and so the works are a bit abstract, but they also have very specific imagery within them. So, it's sort of a combination of styles and techniques that are really exciting.”
Central to the exhibition are plant-human images. Neither fully human nor botanical, these hybrid forms become symbols of interconnectedness and resistance, rejecting the exploitation of people, land, and culture.
The exhibition opens Aug. 20 and runs through Sept. 26.
MORE INFORMATION:
The exhibition derives its title from Christina Sharpe's “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being,” in which the author illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery. In the book, Sharpe describes the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather." She then shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, Sharpe then offers a way forward.
According to Williams, his plant-human figures are inspired by Suzanne Césaire, a theorist, postcolonial feminist activist, and surrealist from Martinique. She published seven essays in the short-lived literary journal “Tropiques,” which she established and co-edited with her husband. Among the “theories” she proposed was the potential for a multi-ethnic, multi-natural composition of society, cultural appropriation rather than cultural assimilation and an embrace of Black identity that was regarded as scandalous at the time, even by fellow Black intellectuals. Sadly, she wrote only during the four-year life of “Tropiques” (it ceased operations in 1945), but her writings continue to influence contemporary artists and authors, including Williams.
About Antoine Williams
Williams received his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has completed prestigious residencies including the Joan Mitchell Residency, the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, the Hambidge Center, Loghaven Artist Residency, and Duke University's Rubenstein Arts Center.
His honors include the Joan Mitchell Award for Painters and Sculptors, the National Academy of Design's Abbey Mural Prize, the South Arts Individual Artist Career Opportunity Grant, and the Harpo Foundation Grant.
His work has been exhibited nationally at Smack Mellon, the Nasher Museum of Art, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, 21c Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art, PRIZM Art Fair, and the California Museum of Photography, and is included in the collections of the Nasher Museum of Art and the North Carolina Museum of Art. Williams is assistant professor of Drawing in the Expanded Field at the University of Florida.
About Art Center Sarasota
Founded in 1926, Art Center Sarasota serves as the first and oldest visual arts organization in Sarasota. Art Center Sarasota is admission-free and open to the public. Its mission is to bring together creatives and the broader public to increase understanding of the human condition, support wellbeing, and build community connection through the universal language of art.
Exhibitions are supported in part by Sarasota County Tourist Development Tax revenues and generous donors.
Art Center Sarasota is located at 707 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
