About the Work

In 2017, Williams dedicated a significant portion of his practice to exploring, collecting, and documenting communities within the lowcountry that are representative of African American entrepreneurship and ingenuity. It’s not uncommon to find vestiges of master craftsmanship, agricultural expertise, and architectural beauty. Homestead is an assemblage of the most iconic fragments collected during Williams’ explorations.

The overall design of “Homestead” is inspired by a multi-use barn near the outskirts of Walterboro, S.C. The barn was a grand structure that housed grain, hogs, cauldrons, and farming tools. It was an elegant matrix of rafters and raw timber columns enclosed by dull corrugated tin. Williams mimicked these features in Homestead by creating an intricate exposed rafter system using weathered picket-fence and wrapping the core structure with rusted tin roofing that recovered from a Freedman’s Cottage located on upper Meeting St. The haint-blue concave section of the structure is comprised of tongue-and-groove siding taken from a small vacated home located only a few miles from the barn. And to represent the barn’s agricultural component, the sculpture is decorated with a series of rusted rebar hooks identical to those used to aid farmers in the butchering of livestock.

About The Griffith Reyburn Visual Arts Fund

The Griffith/Reyburn Visual Arts Fund was created in 2003 by Michael Griffith and Donna Reyburn as an endowment with Coastal Community Foundation.  The endowment provides the annual “Lowcountry Artist of the Year Award” to support the creation of a work of visual art that represents an aspect of the South Carolina Lowcountry’s unique life, culture, or environment— its “look and feel.” 

Learn More About the Griffith Reyburn Visual Arts Fund

SUPPORTED BY

Coastal Community Foundation's annual Artist of the Year Award and the Griffith Reyburn Visual Arts Fund