Abbey Williams x Black Mamas Matter

Abbey Williams x Black Mamas Matter

In response to the current and urgent need to support and affirm Black life, Sargent’s Daughters is presenting a new series of drawings by Abbey Williams to raise funds for Black Mamas Matter, a cross-sectoral cultural alliance led by Black women that is dedicated to advocacy, research, and empowerment for Black mothers everywhere. Black Mamas Matter aims to provide Black mothers with the necessary resources and care—emotional, practical—that they are often deprived of due to the classist and racist nature of the American healthcare system. 

Abbey Williams is a Brooklyn-based video artist whose work addresses sexuality, grief, and the body through familiar cinematic forms, such as subtitles, credits, the intermission, and the black frame. Williams was set to premiere a new video for a summer exhibition at Sargent's Daughters, but that has now been postponed due to, well, everything.

Supporting Black Mamas Matter is personal for Williams: in 2009, she suffered the stillbirth of her first son. It took years for her to return to making art after this profound and devastating loss. But it also forced Williams to look deeper into the structures and politics of the American healthcare system, and why it so often fails the needs—at the most basic levels—of too many Black mothers. 

Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants — a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery.*

Williams turns to drawing when she feels creatively blocked, or needs the immediacy of expression that such an activity provides. By inking these pages from vintage travel guides, the artist decolonizes them, foregrounding Blackness both politically and formally. There is a simultaneous sense of loss and presence in these new works that is also reiterated in her videos—she has long situated the black space in her art as an affective and narrative tool that works on the viewer in subtle or virtually imperceptible ways, repeatedly employing black frames around images or enlisting entirely black frames that cut or fade to or from black. But they aren’t interstitial. The blackness holds the same space an image would. 

As the images reveal themselves in this striking new project, Williams asks: What if blackness becomes the opposite of an erasure? Does blackness have to recede? Is the blackness on top of an image a redaction, or a fathomless space of possibility? 

About the works:

Each work is ink on book page, 8 x 11 inches and priced individually at $1,750.  

100% of the gallery's portion of sales will be donated to Black Mamas Matter.  

If you are unable to purchase this work, please consider giving to Black Mamas Matter directly.

As Daughters we stand together with Mothers.

Artwork details:

Untitled Ink Series (crowd), 2020, ink on book page, 11 x 8 inches, SOLD

Untitled Ink Series (flower field), 2020, ink on book page, 11 x 8 inches, SOLD

Untitled Ink Series (all black), 2020, ink on book page, 11 x 8 inches, SOLD

Untitled Ink Series (fall), 2020, ink on book page, 11 x 8 inches, SOLD

Untitled Ink Series (boy), 2020, ink on book page, 11 x 8 inches, SOLD

Untitled Ink Series (sorting), 2020, ink on book page, 11 x 8 inches, SOLD

About the artist:

Abbey Williams received her BFA from The Cooper Union, her MFA from Bard College, and was a participant at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her videos have been exhibited at TATE Britain, London, UK; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Spain; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Williams was a part of the 2005 Greater New York exhibition at MoMA PS1. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Flash Art, and ARTFORUM.

* Villarosa, Linda "Why Amerca's Black Mothers and Babies are in a Life-or-Death Crises" The New York Times, April 11, 2018.