ABOUT THE WORK

Commissioned by the International African American Museum for its permanent collection, Current stretches nearly twenty-nine feet along a narrow passageway in the museum. Its scale makes it difficult to take in all at once. The viewer encounters the work while moving beside it, seeing one section disappear as another comes into view.

The work is built from patinated steel layered over blue mirrored acrylic. Across the steel, openings derived from azalea blossoms break apart the otherwise continuous surface. Through them, flashes of blue mirror appear and disappear as the viewer moves. Williams was drawn to the difference between the two materials. The steel is dark, heavy, weathered, and opaque. The mirror underneath is bright, reflective, and difficult to hold visually. Light catches it differently from one position to the next. At times the blue appears almost flat; elsewhere it resembles glimpses of water or sky. The viewer’s own reflection enters the work in fragments and disappears just as quickly. The azalea pattern came from a flower Williams knew intimately from the landscape of Charleston and the Lowcountry. Repeated across the length of the steel, the flower becomes less an illustration of a plant than a field of openings—dense in some places, sparse in others. What begins as something botanical becomes pattern, perforation, light, and movement.

The title Current came from Williams’s attraction to water and to the different meanings carried by the word itself: a current is movement through water, but it also describes energy, flow, and the present moment. Water has particular weight inside the International African American Museum, which stands at Gadsden’s Wharf on Charleston Harbor, a site inseparable from the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Williams did not attempt to illustrate that history in the work. Instead, water remained an image and material association capable of holding contradictory things at once—beauty and danger, movement and distance, arrival and departure. Because of the hallway, Current cannot be approached from a single ideal viewpoint. The work changes as the viewer passes it. Steel gives way to blue. Flowers become openings. Reflections appear between solid surfaces. One’s own body enters the work and then falls out of it.

The piece is never entirely visible at once. That condition—something continually appearing, disappearing, and moving alongside you—is where Current begins

Other Works at iaam

In Praise of a Sto’ Front Church
In 2023, the International African Museum, in Charleston, S.C. also acquired In Praise of a Sto’ Front Church, for its permanent collection. This artwork is displayed in the museum’s Gullah Geechee Gallery.