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AIR WORKSHOP WITH AVERY WILLIAMSON: IMAGINING YPSILANTI HISTORIES AND FUTURES THROUGH COLLAGE
July 25 @ 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
In this workshop, participants will work with artist Avery Williamson to create collages using historical photos from Ypsilanti, and through this practice will challenge dominant historical narratives. The workshop’s goals include teaching primary source research skills, introducing participants to local archives, and offering participants a hands-on experience in recontextualizing historical materials for creative expression.
This workshop will include a discussion of artist Avery Williamson’s process and motivations. Avery describes her approach to her research based practice as follows: “My work as a multidisciplinary artist challenges the flatness, fixity, and polarity of history. My art practice regularly questions the kinds of histories that we preserve, and considers what might be missing. I’m drawn to the fragments and remnants that I encounter in the archive: a sly look between two people in the corner of a photograph, a bit of handwriting in the margin of a typed document, the formal guest list for a big event but all the other people in the background who made it possible. It is the everyday, unremarkable, domestic activities that make up the bulk of our lives. It is in these interactions with our interior selves, partners, friends, colleagues that we develop and hone our sense of self and our beliefs. This is why the quotidian is important to my work. I seek to give space to the feelings that accompany historic moments that are often unrecorded.”
Ages 16+
Ages 9 – 16 with an accompanying guardian
July 25, 2024. 5:00 – 6:30pm.
Off Center
Free to the public
Bio:
Avery Williamson is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores historical and contemporary notions of the archive, domestic space, Black pleasure and spatiotemporal collapse. She explores the narratives of Black women in personal and institutional archives. Her work as a multidisciplinary artist challenges the flatness, fixity, and polarity of history. Williamson’s practice regularly questions the kinds of histories that we preserve, and considers what might be missing. Her artwork has been featured in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine and Guardian News. She graduated from Harvard College with a degree in Visual Studies and currently lives and works in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
