Fletcher Williams III
2021 South Carolina Fellow and Southern Prize Finalist
Southern Prize Finalist
Recipient Information
Location
Charleston, South Carolina
Medium
Mixed Media
Year of Award
2021
Grant or Fellowship
Southern Prize and State Fellowships
Grant Amount
$5,000
Artist Biography
Fletcher Williams III (b. 1987) is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and painting. Williams received his BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement in Science and Art (2010). He maintained a studio practice in Long Island City, Queens, and later Crowns Heights, Brooklyn before returning to his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, in 2013. Upon his return to Charleston, Williams remained an independent artist and began producing solo exhibitions throughout the City of Charleston and North Charleston, the latest being a site-wide solo exhibition, Promiseland (2020), at the Historic Aiken-Rhett House Museum.
Artist Statement
My work engages the rituals and traditions of the American South. My interest in the way we seek to establish place and identity has prompted a working methodology that utilizes found and natural materials and an exhibition practice that incorporates public and historic sites. I often paint with Spanish moss, builds house-like structures with salvaged wood and tin roof, and fashion delicate sculptures out of handwoven palmetto roses. My approach is architectural and figural, tactile, and multi-sensory and unveils my curiosity for both people and place, material, and process.
Work Garden
Year: 2020
Medium: Brick, Palm Fronds, Wood, Tin Roof
Size (h x w x d): 46 x 27 feet
“Work Garden”, installed in the Work Yard of the Aiken-Rhett House is comprised of a field of dried palm fronds surrounded by a multimedia sculpture independently titled “Homestead”.
Work Garden is a reclamation of space. The term garden implies a sense of leisure not endemic to those imprisoned at this urban plantation. To invoke the ingenuity of black people I created a decorative landscape made of materials specific to black labor and craft: Planters (brick columns made with 19th century bricks sourced from a neighboring plantation, palm fronds that are used to make Charleston Palmetto Roses, the center structure, Homestead, is a combination inverted pickets, rebar hooks, tongue and groove siding, and rusted tin roof. Tin roof was sourced from a local deteriorating Freedman’s cottage, rebar hooks are replicas of those used in animal butchering. In its entirety is an homage to the black imagination and ingenuity essential to surviving the South.
Pickets
Year: 2020
Medium: Fabricated and Painted Wooden Pickets
Size (h x w x d): Wooden Base 8 x 6 feet, Tallest Picket 7.5 feet
Exhibition: “Promiseland” at the historic Aiken-Rhett House, July 2020
Installation Site - 2nd floor of enslaved live/work quarters.
“Pickets” is the first sculptural ideation of my ongoing picket fence series. It is the picket’s anthropomorphic quality that allowed it to become a series of contorted figures. This installation is meant to illustrate the restrictions of space and movement for the enslaved persons living on this complex. My installation left only a couple feet on any side, pressing visitors against the walls and minimizing breathable space. Pickets reached the ceiling further highlighting the tightness of this incredibly small space meant to house up to eight people at times. This space is not climate controlled and sits above a kitchen/stove that would have been burning year round to be sure food could be prepped at a moments notice.
Eden
Year: 2019
Medium: Acrylic on Paper
Size (h x w x d): 72 x 120 inches
Promiseland concluded with “Eden”. After visitors made their way through the work yard, enslaved living quarters, and lower interior space of the Aiken Rhett House, they were met with Eden. It is a piece, merely by its title, that invokes ideas of liberation and freedom. It's a series of intertwining figures against a blue sky. Some figures stand tall and independent while others group together under roof-like configurations. Visitors were posed with the question, what is the American Dream in the context of an urban plantation? This series of large scale works on paper was not intended for the Aiken Rhett House but given the social unrest, this house became an ideal site to enter the local and national conversation addressing monuments to the past.
*During the course of the exhibition the John C. Calhoun statue was removed from its pedestal at Marion Square. The Aiken Rhett House prominently displays a portrait of Calhoun.
Gift to a Gardener (Detail)
Year: 2019
Medium: Palm Leaves and Handwoven Roses
Size (h x w x d): 80 x 44 x 30 inches
Roses are made with green leaves as freshly stripped leaves are most pliable. Over the course of several years the roses dry to a light beige. The fading/drying process occurs much faster in sunlight.
Gift to a Gardener
Year: 2019
Medium: Palm Leaves, Handwoven Roses, Tin Roof, Fence
Size (h x w x d): 80 x 44 x 30 inches
Shroud of handwoven roses - 44 x 70 x 3 in. The rose shroud sits atop sheets of rusted tin roof, the same sheets used to construct Homestead pictured in Work Garden. The base is made of six foot fence slats that were cut into shorter pointed slats.
For visitors, this multimedia sculpture was a disruption to the idyllic views of the Charleston landscape. Its placement juxtaposes vernaculars and identities, African American craft and Charleston architecture. It is a collision of aesthetic and class, utility and ornamentation. Like many of my works, the materials conjure the past and ultimately performs as eulogy.
Untitled
Year: 2020
Medium: Reclaimed Picket Fence
Size (h x w x d): Approximately 36 inches high
A section of picket fence was disassembled and separated into individual figures attached to their own base. Each picket was placed along steps that traces a servant's path from the Servants Hall to other parts of the house: dining room, parlor, bed chambers, and drawing room.
Untitled
Year: 2020
Medium: Reclaimed Picket Fence
Size (h x w x d): Approximately 36 inches high
Untitled
Year: 2019
Medium: Acrylic on Paper
Size (h x w x d): 72 x 48 inches
On the backside of this piece hangs another painting. It is merely identical in the that pickets are closed and not opened. For those inside of the home, the pickets are open, unblocked. For those on the outside, the pickets are closed, an architectural impasse.
En Masse
Year: 2019
Medium: Acrylic on Paper
Size (h x w x d): 72 x 72 inches
Exhibition: Promiseland
Location: Aiken-Rhett House
En Masse is composed of hundreds of rubbings of a single picket.
Throughout the Aiken-Rhett House Museum, visitors discovered a combination of decorative, figurative, and spatial representations of pickets that not only disrupted this historically complex symbol but offered opportunities to reimagine the social and cultural landscapes of the American South.
En Masse
Year: 2019
Medium: Acrylic on Paper
Size (h x w x d): 72 x 72 inches