Artist Bio
Noelle Lorraine Williams was born in 1975 in Jersey City, NJ. She is a conceptual artist living and working in Newark, NJ. She works to build engaged communities utilizing public dialogue and culture to explore our greatest fears as individuals within the context of community - utilizing sculpture, multimedia practices, events and performance. She received her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Social and Historical Inquiry from The New School for Social Research. Williams has also participated in workshops at The Newark Museum Arts Workshop, The Art Students League and The Newark School of Theology.

Over the past five years Williams work has garnered recognition. She has exhibited in New York and New Jersey including the The Jersey City Museum, Rush Arts Gallery, Newark Arts Council and Victory Hall amongst other public venues and private galleries. She has participated in juried and invitational group shows and is an award winning artist. Her work has been mentioned in the New York Times, The Star Ledger, Code Z , WBAI, WNYC and she was cited as one of the “100 Women We Love” in GO NYC magazine for her work dealing with art and community. She was also awarded acceptance and completed Emerge 10 at Aljira, A Contemporary Arts Center in Newark, NJ.

Williams has been the recipient of grants and in-kind support for her public events including The Museum of African American Music, Newark, NJ and Liberation in Truth Social Justice Center in Newark, NJ.

She draws on her social justice work with students and community groups utilizing culture for transformative practices to inform her conceptual art work practice. She also produces REBORN (www.rebornhome.com) an internet portal that explores the intersections between art and community.

Williams’s background includes thirteen years of student and community organizing including: co-founder of (high school) GSA (Gay Straight Alliance) BRIDGE and president of the group WOMEN OF COLOR, member of The New School for Social Research E.N.D. (EDUCATION NOT DOMINATION) and chair of the WORKING GROUP ON WOMEN’S ORGANIZING for The Audre Lorde Project and chair of the Program Committee for Arms Akimbo Organizing Institute (the first women of color organizing conference) in New York. Williams’s work as an activist has been recognized including being cited “Young Activists to Watch Out For” in the 2000 Heritage of Pride Guide.


Artist Statement
2010
Who am I?
Where am I?
Where is my Home?
What is my name?
Who am I responsible to?

I bear witness to human fear. My work reveals a fantastical theatre of American emotional identity.

The figures I create embody the psychic alienation of living in crisis - between multiple time periods, locations, identities, communities and realities. They stand alone or together; hungry to connect or even destroy one and another.

These beings are circus like. They all partake in ritualized actions of betrayal and salvation between themselves, the ancestors and contemporary time - community. This unresolved travel between history, the present and the future is the crisis of American identity, alienation.

By unleashing this pandemonium of conflict, I bear witness to the crisis of fear, vulnerability and the ritual that embraces them – this American Alienation.