Fletcher Williams III of North Charleston, SC, is the 2018 recipient of the Lowcountry Artist of the Year Award from The Griffith/Reyburn Visual Arts Fund.
“With this award, I was able to utilize an array of materials collected over several years and craft them into a 7ft house-like structure indicative of vernacular architecture and agricultural practices unique to the lowcountry,” says Williams.
Homestead by Fletcher Williams III
“Throughout the past two years, I’ve dedicated a significant portion of my practice to exploring, collecting, and documenting communities within the lowcountry that are representative of African American entrepreneurship and ingenuity. It is common for me to scour my familiar urban terrain but just recently I began venturing into rural South Carolina where I’ve come across vestiges of master craftsmanship, agricultural expertise, and architectural beauty. Homestead is an assemblage of the most iconic fragments collected during those explorations.”
“The overall design of Homestead was inspired by a multi-use barn near the outskirts of Walterboro, SC,” adds Williams. “It is a grand structure that housed grain, hogs, cauldrons, and farming tools. It is an elegant matrix of rafters and raw timber columns enclosed by dull corrugated tin. I’ve mimicked these fixtures in Homestead by creating an intricate exposed rafter system using weathered picket-fence and wrapping the core structure with rusted tin roofing recovered from a Freedman’s Cottage located on upper Meeting Street in Charleston, SC. 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.”
Fletcher Williams’ studio in North Charleston, SC
Fletcher Williams III (b. 1987) is a North Charleston, SC, based interdisciplinary artist whose theoretical and conceptual art making practice is rooted in southern vernacular. Williams studied drawing, painting, print making, graphic design, and sculpture at The Cooper Union, where he received a BFA in 2010 and worked for several years thereafter as a freelance graphic designer. While the core of Williams’ education focused on the visual arts, a significant portion of his education was dedicated to studying ritual theory through the lenses of anthropology and sociology. These concepts play an important role in his later works. In 2013, he returned to Charleston and began creating multimedia objects and installations that incorporate historical and contemporary narratives of culture and utility that are unique to the lowcountry. Currently, Williams works out of his single car garage located in the Park Circle neighborhood of North Charleston.
View of an exhibition of works by Fletcher Williams III at 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, SC
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.” The award is intended to assist the artist during creation of an original work of art which is then the personal property of the artist, to keep, show or sell at his or her discretion.
For further info visit (www.fletcher3.com).
