Pat Ward Williams
One of the most outstanding socially conscious artists in America. Williams combines rigorous technique with a perceptive vision of some of the most powerful social and historical themes affecting African Americans in the 20th and 21st centuries.
I’m a city girl, and my coming from Los Angeles to Tallahassee put me in an unfamiliar natural environment. Tallahassee’s natural environment is unrelentingly Floridian: not just trees and grass but unyielding heat and humidity, mammoth creepy crawly things and weather.
This new group of landscape photographs reflects my uneasy relationship to this natural Floridian environment. Through text, image and darkroom processes I try to express my experiences here.
Before printing in the darkroom, the B&W negatives are cut apart and pieced together expressing a disjointed and non-linear narrative. The colors applied to the B&W prints are meant to be a bit too tropical, a little old fashioned or just slightly “off.” The handwritten stories and scraps of conversation are autobiographic but vague because of their incompleteness. These personal stories bump into the organics of the landscape then merge and interlock.
Education
MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)
Teaching Areas
Photography
Public Art