Comics, Historiography, and Creative Praxis

Rachel Williams, Artist, Scholar, & Dean of Liberal Arts at the UNC School for the Arts in Winston-Salem, NC
Wednesday, April 17th, 2024, 5:30 PM EST
via YouTube Live

Co-hosted by Associate Professor Clarissa Ceglio, and Digital Media and Design Students Victoria Westlein and Joss Robinson

Rachel Williams will share her work and process related to illustrating and storytelling historical narratives with threads to current cultural issues. In particular, she will share her work related to Run Home if You Don't Want to be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 and Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching and her latest work, The Curse of Salt.

About the Speaker:

Rachel Marie-Crane Williams earned a B.F.A in Painting and Drawing from East Carolina University, an M.F.A in Studio Art and a Ph.D. in Art Education from Florida State University. She was a full professor and Department Chair at The University of Iowa in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, and the School of Art and Art History. Currently, she is the Dean of Liberal Arts at the UNC School for the Arts in Winston-Salem, NC. She is the creator of two graphic historiographies, Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching, Verso Press and Run Home If You Don’t Want To Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943, UNC Press and the Duke Center for Documentary Studies. She has worked in communities and prisons for over twenty-five years; her work as an artist is grounded in narrative painting and illustration. Her images are heavily influenced by the natural world. As a scholar, she focuses on race and history, prisons, conflict, gender and education.

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