Throughout 2020 till 2023, Charles Edward Williams was an artist in residency.
Charles Edward Williams was selected by The Center for Art & Public Exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art in 2020 to participate in their National Artist Residence program. CAPE’s residencies promote the exploration of legacies and issues that resonate both locally and nationally, and use art as a lens to inspire dialogue, empower personal experiences, and connect Mississippi across geographic boundaries. CAPE had earlier joined forces with Pike School of Art – Mississippi to gather public input as part of their Art + Exchange story gathering tour, in which participants shared their opinions on the past, present and future of their community. This input was utilized by Williams when he was invited to propose specific project ideas that addressed narratives raised by the public.
In 1960 McComb, Miss, and other surrounding areas endured extreme violence by the KKK, who sought to intimidate and scare black voters. In 1961, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had its first voting registrations in McComb, Mississippi, and Herbert Lee, a member of the NAACP, was murdered near Liberty by white state representative E.H. Hurst. One hundred black high school students protested the expulsion of Brenda Travis, who sat-in at the Greyhound Bus Station in protest of Herbert Lee’s death in McComb, and violence erupted, injuring several SNCC members. The song “We Shall Never Turn Back” shares lyrics specifically related to the incidents of Pike and Amite counties in 1961.
From the historical events that took place in McComb, artist Charles Edward Williams has written and produced 8 tracks for an album EP entitled, FORWARD. The album’s title is an exploration of and response to the 1960s audio/visual project, “We Shall Never Turn Back.” The work juxtaposes Williams’ own personal encounters, past and present, with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The concept album consists of tracks, recorded in McComb, with audio, spoken word, and music from local citizens and community stakeholders. While the music has already been created for FORWARD, Council funding would be used to bring Williams to McComb to continue working with the community, to produce and document a live version of the work, and to create a companion publication and limited-edition vinyl pressing of the album. The album is currently available via the streaming service Bandcamp.
About Charles Edward Williams
Charles Edward Williams was born in Georgetown, South Carolina. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA in 2006 and his Masters of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC in 2017. He has had solo exhibitions at Residency Art Gallery, Inglewood, CA; Artspace, Raleigh, NC; Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC; New Gallery of Modern Art, Charlotte, NC; Central Piedmont College, Charlotte, NC; Morton Fine Art, Washington, DC; and Myrtle Beach Art Museum, Myrtle Beach, SC.
Pike School of Art – Mississippi artist in residence for Fall 2017 was Tucker Neel. The residency took place from November 9 through Novenber 22, 2017.
Tucker Neel holds an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design and a BA in Art History and Visual Arts from Occidental College. He has exhibited work in Los Angeles and across the country in venues such as The MAK Center, Commissary Arts, Samuel Freeman, Bonnelli Contemporary, Control Room, D-Block Projects, LA Freewaves, and well as in various site-specific exhibitions in public spaces.
As a curator he has organized exhibitions for CB1 Gallery, The Regent Galleries, the Bolsky Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, Highways Gallery in Santa Monica, and GATE Projects in Glendale, CA. His work has been reviewed in publications such as the The L.A. Times, The LA Weekly, the L.A. City Beat newspaper, The Tennessean, Art Week, The Nashville Scene, artforum.com, and on Flavorpill.com.
Performing Jim Shaw’s instruction in do it, Tucker Neel’s “good and inspiring piece” uses 323 Projects‘ telephone-based gallery as a venue to extend do it’s authoritative scope, furthering the pioneering exhibition model’s pursuit of expanding the definition of artist, audience, and artwork.
Pike School of Art – Mississippi artists in residence for Spring 2016 were Arden Cone and Millicent Kennedy. The residency took place from June 5 through June 18, 2016.
Arden Cone earned her Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and Studio Art from Hollins University, Roanoke, VA. She is currently a Masters of Fine Arts Candidate in Painting at Boston University, Boston, MA.
Espoused forever to its history, the South lives on. As an idea, it is perpetually covered in the dust of its antebellum sins. In the wake of these wrongdoings is a contemporary South fraught with racial tension, shame, and violence.. Cone’s art confronts these issues by addressing the idea of privilege. Her paintings are attempts to raise consciousness about the nuances one faces as he or she really studies America’s colonial antiquities. In her words, “It’s my own tension. I feel a love for the era’s time-honored decadence as much as I feel the guilt of being a modern Southern belle.”
Millicent Kennedy, born in Mendenhall, Mississippi, currently lives in Chicago, IL where she studied Printmaking at City Colleges of Chicago before earning a Bachelor of Arts in Printmaking from Northeastern Illinois University. She is continuing her studies at Northeastern Illinois University where she is a Master of Fine Arts Candidate in Printmaking.
Kennedy’s artwork focuses on efforts to document the fleeting but telling, details that often get lost. She uses fabric for it’s association with repetitive work, and connection to the body. This use of household objects creates contradictory contexts for the artwork, existing in both a fine arts sphere and in the functional world. The everyday environment sets up a stage on which time is recorded.
Pike School of Art – Mississippi artists in residence for Fall 2015 were Samwell Freeman, Mackenzie Hoffman, and Keith Walsh. The residency took place from October 12, through October 25, 2015.
Samwell Freeman, a Computer Vision researcher at Apple, developing software for large-scale construction of 3D images, completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the City University of New York. He has taught math and programming courses and led workshops on interactive art, Arduino, and 3D printing at Alpha One Labs, a hacker space in Brooklyn.
During his residency, Freeman worked on an interactive video installation called Beautalyzer. Beautalyzer displays the output and inner workings of a viewer-taught algorithm, which tries to recognize the beauty of images. The installation is comprised of wall-mounted screens and a 3D printed interface. Machine learning is an increasingly important part of our lives, influencing the news we read, the people we meet, and the things we buy. The Beautalyzer hopes to open up this black box of artificial intelligence. What we find may be frightening or enchanting, demonic or hilarious; in any case, it offers us cybernetic insight into the nature of beauty.
The Beautalyzer project explores the potential for collaborative learning between people and machines. Viewers are given the responsibility to teach the algorithm what is beautiful, by labeling images according to their own aesthetic judgment. Simultaneously, viewers are shown vivid illustrations of the algorithm’s effects.
Mackenzie Hoffman is an interdisciplinary artist living in Los Angeles, CA. She received her B.A. in Studio Arts from the University of Southern California, where she was a recipient of the Handtmann Prize for Photography, as well as the Neely Macomber Travel Prize. She is an alumna of the Mountain School of Art, Los Angeles.
Hoffman uses photography and video to explore the construction of regional identities and their filmic representations, with a primary focus on the contemporary american South. Recent projects have described the gradual encroachment of social change within her multi-generational Southern white family, producing works that are both sympathetic and frustrated. She photographs provincial iconography, including the southern landscape, in an ongoing study of history, location and image.
Hoffman used her time at PSA-MS to further her interest in the present day physical and personal landscapes of the American South and to focus on new video work.
While at PSA-MS, Keith Walsh worked on a project titled “The SNCC Mounds,” a poetic interpolation of the legacy of the McComb-area Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) engagements of the 1960s.
Walsh’s project continues his investigation of the Civil Rights and Black Panthers movements, within the larger geography of American liberation politics. The figure who links these two groups is the black SNCC activist Stokely Carmichael who, in 1964, was the full-time field organizer in Mississippi for the “Freedom Summer” voter registration drives, itinerant “freedom schools,” and protests. Various black residents, businesses, and churches in McComb housed or supported hundreds of SNCC and other civil rights workers during Freedom Summer and were met with repeated police arrests, neglect by governmental authorities, KKK cross-burnings and bombings. The firsthand experience of the sites, people, and histories within McComb were essential to developing Walsh’s project.
While in the region, Walsh conducted research at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, the state capital, and, in New Orleans; and visited cultural resources such as Hilda Casin’s Black History Gallery and met civil rights pioneer, Brenda Travis. To come to PSA-MS, Walsh won The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 2016 Traveling Fellowship. Walsh received his BFA from Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, West Hartford CT and a dual MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University, Boston.
