Abbey Williams x Black Mamas Matter
Sargent’s Daughters | Press Release: June 9, 2020
In response to the current and urgent need to support and affirm Black life, Sargent’s Daughters is presenting a new series of drawings by Abbey Williams to raise funds for Black Mamas Matter, a cross-sectoral cultural alliance led by Black women that is dedicated to advocacy, research, and empowerment for Black mothers everywhere. Black Mamas Matter aims to provide Black mothers with the necessary resources and care—emotional, practical—that they are often deprived of due to the classist and racist nature of the American healthcare system.
Abbey Williams is a Brooklyn-based video artist whose work addresses sexuality, grief, and the body through familiar cinematic forms, such as subtitles, credits, the intermission, and the black frame. Williams was set to premiere a new video for a summer exhibition at Sargent's Daughters, but that has now been postponed due to, well, everything.
Supporting Black Mamas Matter is personal for Williams: in 2009, she suffered the stillbirth of her first son. It took years for her to return to making art after this profound and devastating loss. But it also forced Williams to look deeper into the structures and politics of the American healthcare system, and why it so often fails the needs—at the most basic levels—of too many Black mothers.
Williams turns to drawing when she feels creatively blocked, or needs the immediacy of expression that such an activity provides. By inking these pages from vintage travel guides, the artist decolonizes them, foregrounding Blackness both politically and formally. There is a simultaneous sense of loss and presence in these new works that is also reiterated in her videos—she has long situated the black space in her art as an affective and narrative tool that works on the viewer in subtle or virtually imperceptible ways, repeatedly employing black frames around images or enlisting entirely black frames that cut or fade to or from black. But they aren’t interstitial. The blackness holds the same space an image would.
As the images reveal themselves in this striking new project, Williams asks: What if blackness becomes the opposite of an erasure? Does blackness have to recede? Is the blackness on top of an image a redaction, or a fathomless space of possibility?
* Villarosa, Linda "Why Amerca's Black Mothers and Babies are in a Life-or-Death Crises" The New York Times, April 11, 2018.
