FOR THE RECORD,

Carol Rashawnna Williams (SUVAIR Artist 2019)

HEDREEN GALLERY | AUG 16 - SEPT 14, 2019

VACHON GALLERY | SEPT 23- OCT 11, 2019

Throughout her collaborative, interdisciplinary practice, artist Carol Rashawnna Williams contends that the only way to shift race relations and understand climate change is through collective imaginings and re-imaginings of equitable relationships to the land, animals, and resources. Williams’ aesthetic forms fall, swim, fly, drip, and grow through various layers of reality, spirituality, and data analysis. Her narrative installations reject the tidy, toxic logic of scarcity models, suggesting powerful alternatives in collective storytelling, collective ownership, collective re-valuing of biospecies, and collective commitments to sustainable environmental practices over time.

For the Record, takes into account statements, quotes, statistics regarding climate change, culture shift, paradigm awareness and reframes it in the context of Blackness. Organizing and evaluating information in the 21st Century seems unmanageable and this installation explores filing, shuffling, and categorization of data.

“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices - to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own - for the children and the children yet unborn.”

-“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” Twilight Zone episode aired March 4, 1960

At Hedreen Gallery (8/16/19-9/14/19) Williams presents an exhibition of immersive artworks that combines and contextualizes Williams' installation works from recent years with a new body of work in monoprint, painting and sculpture created onsite at Seattle University. This exhibition will be accompanied by a new written work by Beverly Aarons. The opening celebration on August 15th will include readings from Aarons at 7pm.


At Vachon Gallery (9/23/19- 10/11/19) Williams extends the inquiry of the Hedreen exhibition to build a second, participatory installation that engages the public and Seattle University community in dialogue around the connections between race and climate justice.


In the process of creating and sharing these immersive installation artworks Williams asks:

What experiences have you experienced with racial tension and climate justice?
What equitable solutions do you see to these challenges?
How can you shift the paradigm for the common good?

_{Carol Rashawnna Williams, For the Record, residency and exhibition at Vachon Gallery. Summer 2019. Photo by Joe Freeman Jr.}

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Artist Bio 

Carol Rashawnna Williams (Seattle) was born in Topeka, Kansas into a military family. She lived in Germany until the age of 11, when her family relocated to Tacoma. Carol graduated from Evergreen State College and was immediately accepted into Vista-Americorps in Seattle's White Center neighborhood, where she worked with young, single mothers of Head Start.

After moving to Seattle, Carol became a mother herself. She resides in the TK Lofts in Pioneer Square and works to mentor emerging artists from various backgrounds. Carol believes in the power of art to build community, bridge community relationships, and create authentic space for healing. A large body of her work deals with environmentalism, PNW conifers, old-growth trees, endangered animals, and climate change. Carol was certified through the City of Seattle Parks & Recreation Urban Forest Educator Program and loves to teach about conifers, indigenous and invasive species. You can find her walking all over Seattle.

Carol earned a 4Culture Conductive Garboil Award (2018), an Artist Residency AADK Spain (2018), a 4Culture Artist Community Grant Award (2017) and was accepted to Seattle Office of Arts & Culture’s Public Art Boot Camp (2018). She is the owner of K-Love 4 Art, co-founder of both Race & Climate Justice Art Collective and ARTifACTS, and the Co-Executive Director at Community Arts Create. She was recently accepted in the Environmental Leadership Program, a yearlong national fellowship to support emerging leaders in environmental justice.

About the SUVAIR Program: 

The Seattle University Visual Artist-in-Residence program was formed to facilitate research and support for artists in their creative process. This program, funded by the Pigott Family Endowment for the Arts, is designed to foster a unique environment for artists and students from which new ideas emerge that can change the way we see the world. The residency provides artists with the valuable resources of time and space for open-ended investigation, experimentation, and collaboration. The program gives artists the opportunity to push the boundaries of their own practice. This freedom we hope will foster collaborations that promote new approaches to arts education, foster community-building, and provide a catalyst for social change. The SUVAIR creates a forum for dialogue between the public and the artist in residence through studio space, experimental exhibitions, and other forms of public programming and materials. 

 *The banner image at the top of this page features artwork by Carol Rashawnna Williams (2019), Romson Regarde Bustillo (2019), Sanctuary City Project (2019-20), and E.T. Russian (2019-20).

Hedreen Gallery

Lee Center for the Arts (CNFA)

Open Wednesday through Saturday from 1-6pm