The Wildcrafting Our Queerness Project

Charles Williams

Charles Williams was a sculptor, illustrator, and comic artist from Blue Diamond, Kentucky. Artistic from a young age, Williams moved to Lexington as an adult to work as a janitor for IBM. He would take pieces of industrial plastic and other factory waste home with him, where he would combine them with the natural features surrounding his house to create dozens of unique assemblage sculptures that reflected his Afrofuturist visions of nature, humanity, and technology. In addition to these sculptures, which filled his yard and house, Williams was a skilled self-taught illustrator, often creating massive comic book characters out of scavenged door frames that hung throughout nearby trees. Though never published in his lifetime, Institute 193 (an art gallery based out of Lexington and New York) recently bound and released Cosmic Giggles, a collection of drawings which tell a story of aliens from Mars visiting Earth only to be horrified by racism, pollution, and homelessness. Williams died in 1999 in artistic obscurity. Recent attention, however, such as a 2020 exhibit at the Atlanta Contemporary, signals an increased interest in the artist's unique style and philosophical vision. 

A selection of Williams' art and the transcription of a 1995 interview with art historian Will Arnett are available through the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, an organization which documents and preserves the art of Black artists from the South. 

Following his death, a mutual aid organization, A Moveable Feast Lexington, was founded in his honor. This organization works to reduce the harm of HIV/AIDS in Kentucky by preparing and delivering meals for those living with the virus. You can learn more about the organization, donate, or volunteer on their website. 

It is also important to note that Williams' gender and sexual identity were never publicly known and that accounts of his gender and sexuality largely come from people who were acquainted with him during his life. The label of "queer" may not be completely accurate. Nevertheless, his engagement with his environment and the people around as well as the lasting legacy of his art and memory certainly gesture towards a deviation from heteronormative and cisnormative standards. 

All images from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and the Atlanta Contemporary.

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