7x7x7 Series: Marisa Williamson
Marisa Williamson is the sixth featured artist in our sixth 7x7x7 Series, which asks 7 questions to 7 Charlottesville artists and is published once a week for 7 weeks. Artist interviews and studio visits were conducted by our summer intern, Kalista Diamantopoulos. Photos were taken by Benita Mayo.
This summer's series is presented by The Seven Society and features artists affiliated with the University of Virginia.
Photo Credit: Benita Mayo
Intro written by Kalista Diamantopoulos. Published September 14, 2022.
On a warm Summer day, artist Marisa Williamson’s in-home studio is light and airy. Windows surround the entire space, inviting in sunlight dappled through tall, sturdy trees — peppering the distinctive black-and-white checkered floor with splotches of sunlight. Outside, the gentle rustling of leaves from the warm, midday breeze harmonizes with the sway of the ceiling fan. One of the central windows is a bit larger than the rest, and is accentuated with pink, green and blue stain-glass squares around its perimeter. Below this window is Marisa’s deskspace, and Marisa herself, sitting on a burnt-orange fabric desk chair, recounting her creative work on Sally Hemings, while holding her 8-month-old baby, who is babbling cheerily in her lap.
Having just recently moved into this house, much of her materials and books are still packed up in boxes, but, standing against one of the walls, is a dress-form displaying her Sally Hemings dress — a dress made of a blue textile that she printed on and hand-sewed for a series of performances in which she embodied the ghost of Hemings. The series of Hemings performances are just one example of Marisa’s project-based body of work that engages with historical narratives and themes of race, feminism, and legacy.
After having produced site-specific works at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (2013) and the University of Virginia (2019), as well as currently serving as an Assistant Professor of Visual Art at the University of Virginia since 2021 — Marisa feels that moving back to Charlottesville has been a realization of a dream, seeing as it is a place where her much of her work is deeply rooted.
Currently, Marisa is working on a new project, Unsettling Grounds — an app consisting of custom maps and site specific artworks by Black, indigenous, and low-income artists in Charlottesville which allows audiences to participate in an augmented reality scavenger hunt that critiques and provides context to the historic Charlottesville Woolen Mills industrial site in Albemarle County.
1. Describe what you are currently working on?
In partnership with Visible Records, the Bridge PAI, Albemarle County, and a handful of other community partners, I’m creating an augmented reality smartphone app and scavenger hunt that will feature monumental artworks conceived by a cohort of local artists-in-residence. Right now I’m drafting the open call– which targets Black, indigenous and low-income artists in the region. The project aims to make hidden histories visible along the Broadway Corridor and around Woolen Mills.
2. What is your ideal creative environment?
I love attending artist residencies! Last summer I went to VCCA in Amherst, VA. Residencies are a chance to get away, focus, and be surrounded by creative folks who I can learn from. I try to reproduce those conditions back at home — accepting and creating projects that require bursts of attention, collaboration and conversation with others, and are transportative and site-responsive.
3. How has Charlottesville impacted your artistic work and life as an artist?
Charlottesville has had a huge impact on my life and work! For my grad school thesis in 2013, I donned a dress of my own making and performed as Sally Hemings at Monticello. I wanted to trouble an interpretive landscape in which the lived experience of enslaved people was all but invisible. I took that persona all over the country (and to Paris) to engage public audiences in questions of freedom, power, choices, and the past. I came back to UVA in 2018 as the Ruffin Distinguished Artist in Residency. Last year I returned as an Assistant Professor. It wasn’t easy to accept the position. My husband is an Associate Professor at Rutgers Business School in New Jersey. Living and working 300 miles apart, it was unclear how we would make a home for the baby I was pregnant with. Fortunately, Tom has agreed to join the Engineering School as an Assistant Professor in the fall. It helps that Charlottesville is a great place to live: it offers great food, hiking, wine, and a way for us to be together.
Photo credit: Benita Mayo
4. What frustrates you as an artist?
For a few years I’ve been collaborating with a team based in Hartford, CT. The group consists of poor, HIV-positive, non-binary, Black, Puerto Rican, and neuro-divergent folks. We have a great idea to transform the exterior of a shuttered elementary school using dance, signage, sculpture, and sound. The school was closed in 2015 after toxic building materials (manufactured by Monsanto) started making students and teachers sick. We received a small grant from an organization in Chicago, but are struggling to get the resources we need from organizations in the city that the project serves. It’s frustrating and impossible to give up on.
5. How do you manage a work-life balance as an artist?
It is hard for me to turn off and unplug from my work. The work-life balance or ‘boundary’ is something I am always questioning, creatively and practically. I recently had a child, moved my family to a new city, and started a new job. As a result, I’ve been especially conscientious about my time, my commitments, and what it means to be present and engaged. I always want to do what’s right — but, having been raised with a range of high expectations, cultural pressures, structural inequalities — it’s often difficult to know the difference between what I want and what I think I should want. That being said, I’m always on the lookout for new self-management tools. A recent find was ‘the four Ds’: delegate, diminish, delay, delete. I look at my to-do list throughout the week and find ways to 1) give away work that I don’t need to be doing, 2) make tasks smaller and simpler, 3) put tasks off for later (it can be helpful to literally schedule a time to start worrying about something), or 4) accept a task doesn’t need doing and ‘delete’ it from the list.
6. Describe your favorite creative work by another Charlottesville artist?
Many of my favorite artists live in Charlottesville and make work that impresses me, wins awards, tours museums, and screens internationally. However, I have to shout out Doreen Bonnet, Executive Director of Birth Sisters of Charlottesville. She’s a visual artist and practices all sorts of healing through her work as a doula. This past December she crafted Christmas tree ornaments with the photos of little babies from the Birth Sisters community inside glass globes. Some of the babies, like mine, had hard journeys into the world. Her tree monumentalized the often unspeakable love, pain, loss, discovery, and healing experienced by pregnant people and their families. The work was simple and powerful. It made me wonder how many other monuments and monument-makers might be laboring thoughtfully in the quiet corners of our community.
7. How do your other interests influence your art?
I love going for long walks — especially ones that get me out into nature. For fun, I’ll set out on a ‘derivé’ — which is just a fancy french word for a walk with an unplanned route which is determined by chance encounters, desire and attraction to elements in the landscape. It serves as a model for my work in many ways: it reminds me to trust myself, tune in to my surroundings, and stay open to unexpected collaborations with the unknown and unknowable.
Marisa Williamson is a project-based artist who works in video, image-making, installation and performance around themes of history, race, feminism, and technology. She has produced site-specific works at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (2013), Storm King Art Center (2016), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2016), and by commission from Monument Lab Philadelphia (2017). Her work has been featured in exhibitions internationally. Williamson has been awarded grants from the Graham Foundation, Rema Hort Mann Foundation and the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. She was a participant in the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2012 and the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 2014-2015. Williamson holds a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from CalArts. She is on the faculty of the McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia.
The opinions expressed in this interview are solely those of the artist and do not necessarily represent the policies or positions of NCAI.
This summer's series is presented by The Seven Society and features artists affiliated with the University of Virginia.
