Collage Student
Nineteen-year-old artist Lorna Williams lost most of her work in Hurricane Katrina. Now, after months in her Boston studio, she's ready to show her riotous pieces on Newbury Street.
Lorna Williams is about to have her art exhibited at the Judi Rotenberg Gallery on Newbury Street – no small accomplishment for a 19-year-old. While most artists spend years trying to break into the Boston gallery scene, Williams, a sophomore at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, takes her local debut in stride. She already has sold dozens of works, won numerous awards and scholarships, and exhibited her art all over her native New Orleans, including two solo shows at the New Orleans Fine Arts Center.
Still, it’s been a struggle to make the upcoming show happen. Before beginning her second year at the school in September, Williams and her family were among those fleeing New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina roared in. A cousin who stayed behind had to be rescued from a rooftop. Her father’s house, where Williams had spent the summer working in the garage-turned-studio, is gone. She has lost virtually all of her belongings – including most of her art, many pieces of which were created specifically for her Rotenberg show – and her family is scattered from Houston to Atlanta.
From Friday through January 28, gallery visitors can see about two dozen of Williams’s explosive mixed-media collages, which explore themes of race, class, and music. Although Williams primarily depicts people – friends and famous musicians, including her heroine, Nina Simone – some work alludes to weighty subjects like slavery and lynching. But rather than being preachy or pedantic, the young artist presents such themes with subtlety and even beauty; a row of billowing cotton plants, for example, obliquely evokes slave labor.
Williams speaks in a low, leisurely voice and wears dreadlocks that spill over her small frame. She grew up in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward and says she decided to become an artist when she was in the fourth grade. Her demeanor is guarded at first, then relaxed and friendly. She is passionate, defiant, and cool without trying.
Louisiana native Kim Hebert, who taught English to Williams last spring, sees a distinctly New Orleans aesthetic in her student’s art. “It’s a heavy kind of beauty, steeped in a history of absolute pain. Yet there’s a willingness to confront things, and in that confrontation, it also brings pleasure.”
Williams’s collages, though representational, lean toward abstraction – a result of a multi-step process that varies from piece to piece. She often starts with a photograph that she digitally alters until it becomes simply a series of shapes. She then cuts those shapes from various types of paper and places them on pine boards. Adding wax, beads, string, and wire, Williams tries to capture a subject’s personality and energy with the patterns, colors, and textures she chooses.
When depicting friends, Williams asks them to don headphones and listen to music. In the resulting works, headphone wires connect the figures to a musical, almost spiritual dimension beyond our view. In the portrait of jazz drummer Khris Royal, a friend from home studying at Berklee College of Music, the undulating grains of the wood emanating from his body suggest reverberating sound waves.
After spending the fall semester in Boston, shuttling between her tiny studio apartment in Jamaica Plain and her school on the Fenway, Williams is still overwhelmed, homesick, and angry over how the government responded to Katrina. But she is also sanguine about her future. “Life happens,” says Williams slowly. “Change is a gift from God. . . . It’s just a matter of what you do with it. You can take it as an opportunity to start over. That’s what I’m going to do.”
Williams won’t let the hurricane define her. “I don’t want to sell my experience,” she says. “I don’t want people to buy my work because they feel sorry for me or just because I’m an artist from New Orleans.”
For Kristen Dodge, assistant director of the Judi Rotenberg Gallery, Williams’s provenance has nothing to do with why she likes the work. “There’s an emotive immediacy to her work that reads as raw and sincere,” explains Dodge, 29, who saw Williams’s collages last spring at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts open studios and arranged to include her work in this month’s show at the gallery. “At a time when a lot of people are more interested in more ironic, detached work, she’s doing her own thing.”
Williams’s collages will be shown with the graffiti-inspired work of George Rosa, 25, who just graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. The Williams-Rosa show reflects changing times at the gallery, which has been run by Judi Rotenberg’s daughter, 29-year-old Abigail Ross, since 2001. Though the gallery still focuses on established painters and photographers, Ross and Dodge are cultivating a roster of new, young talent.
As a teenager, Williams attended the competitive New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where she took classes for four hours a day in addition to attending a traditional high school. At the museum school, Williams fuses the many different skills and interests she acquired in New Orleans, including digital imaging, photography, printmaking, bookmaking, woodworking, and music.
Williams plans to return to New Orleans, where she one day hopes to open an arts school for college students. It’s a lofty goal, and Williams knows she’ll need expertise in arts education and business to launch such a project. She also recognizes that many people who fled New Orleans won’t return; her father, for one, will most likely stay in Atlanta, where he’s found a better job. But Williams thinks musicians and artists will go back: “These people have a relationship with New Orleans that is more than just physical. For them, it’s spiritual. It’s in the air.”
Rachel Strutt is a freelance writer in Somerville. E-mail her at rachelstrutt@yahoo.com. 