Seattle University Department of Art, Art History and Design hosts Carol Rashawnna Williams for a summer Seattle University Artist in Residence (SUVAIR) residency and two-part exhibition series, For the record,.

• August 16 – September 14
• Hedreen Gallery
• Opening Reception and reading: August 15, 6-8 p.m., reading 7 p.m.

Williams presents an exhibition of immersive artworks that combines and contextualizes Williams' installation works from recent years with a new body of work in monoprint, painting and sculpture created onsite at Seattle University. A new written work by Beverly Aarons accompanies this exhibition.

• September 23 – October 11
• Vachon Gallery
• Closing Reception: Thursday, October 10, 4-7 p.m.

Williams extends the inquiry of the Hedreen exhibition to build a second, participatory installation that engages the public and Seattle University community in dialogue around the connections between race and climate justice. Williams asks:

• What experiences have you experienced with racial tension and climate justice?
• What equitable solutions do you see to these challenges?
• How can you shift the paradigm for the common good?

Information about gallery hours and locations is available here.

Carol Rashawnna Williams is a Seattle-based, interdisciplinary artist who makes work that engages audiences in conversations about social, environmental, and racial justice. While in residence at Seattle University, Williams will create two dynamic art installations that include prints, paintings and sculptures made of primarily recycled or reused materials. These participatory exhibitions are free and open to the public.

Throughout her collaborative interdisciplinary practice, Carol Rashawnna Williams contends that the only way to shift race relations and understand climate change is through collective imaginings and re-imaginings of equitable relationships to the land, animals and resources. Williams’ aesthetic forms fall, swim, fly, drip and grow through various layers of reality, spirituality and data analysis. Her narrative installations reject the tidy, toxic logic of scarcity models, suggesting powerful alternatives in collective storytelling, collective ownership, collective re-valuing of biospecies and collective commitments to sustainable environmental practices over time.

About the Artist

Carol Rashawnna Williams (Seattle) was born in Topeka, Kansas into a military family. She lived in Germany until the age of 11, when her family relocated to Tacoma. Carol graduated from Evergreen State College, and was immediately accepted into Vista-Americorps in Seattle's White Center neighborhood, where she worked with young, single mothers of Head Start.

After moving to Seattle, Carol became a mother herself. She resides in the TK Lofts in Pioneer Square and works to mentor emerging artists from various backgrounds. Carol believes in the power of art to build community, bridge community relationships, and create authentic space for healing. A large body of her work deals with environmentalism, PNW conifers, old growth trees, endangered animals, and climate change. Carol was certified through the City of Seattle Parks & Recreation Urban Forest Educator Program and loves to teach about conifers, indigenous and invasive species. You can find her walking all over Seattle.

Carol earned a 4Culture Conductive Garboil Award (2018), an Artist Residency AADK Spain (2018), a 4Culture Artist Community Grant Award (2017) and was accepted to Seattle Office of Arts & Culture’s Public Art Boot Camp (2018). She is the owner of K-Love 4 Art, co-founder of both Race & Climate Justice Art Collective and ARTifACTS, and the Co-Executive Director at Community Arts Create. She was recently accepted in the Environmental Leadership Program, a yearlong national fellowship to support emerging leaders in environmental justice.

About the SUVAIR Program

The Seattle University Artist in Residence program was formed to facilitate research and support for artists in their creative process. This program, funded by the Pigott Family Endowment for the Arts, is designed to foster a unique environment for artists and students from which new ideas emerge that can change the way we see the world. The residency provides artists with the valuable resources of time and space for open-ended investigation, experimentation and collaboration. The program gives artists the opportunity to push the boundaries of their own practice. This freedom we hope will foster collaborations that promote new approaches to arts education, foster community building, and provide a catalyst for social change. The SUVAIR creates a forum for dialogue between the public and the artist in residence through studio space, experimental exhibitions and other forms of public programming and materials.

Images: WATER (2018), photo: Chloe Collyer; The Healing Forest #1, photo: Jay Taylor