First Class

Challenging Boundaries

Hartford Art School Professor Illuminates the Invisible Through a Historical Lens

Marisa Williamson has been challenging the boundaries of the past and present for a good part of her life. Through video, imagemaking, installation, and performance, Williamson interprets themes in history, race, feminism, and technology to bring her audience a new awareness.

“I make art in order to forge new relationships between people and the things around them,” the self-described project-based artist says. “I’m interested in how you can learn more about the place where you live by asking tough questions and learning about its history.”

An assistant professor of 4-D foundations at the Hartford Art School since 2018, Williamson took a scenic route to the University.

“When I first got the job, I also got a residency on the New England Scenic Trail, which is a 215-mile hiking trail from southern Connecticut—Old Saybrook— up to Northfield, Massachusetts,” she says. “That was through the National Park Service, the Connecticut Forest & Park [Association], and the Appalachian Mountain Club. That really helped me get to know the region and come to appreciate what it means to be an artist working in New England.”

The resulting “Monuments to Escape”—a series of interconnected scenes, mementos, postcards, performances, videos, and adventures gathered by the artist, her collaborators, and the public—recently ended a run at Real Art Ways in Hartford.

“The project was all about asking what monuments are missing from the New England Scenic Trail and which voices aren’t being heard,” Williamson emphasizes. “There are 12 different postcards that go into a postcard book, and on each postcard is a proposal for a monument that should exist on the trail. Each one is a collaboration with another artist or activist—Black artists, indigenous food experts, people who have lived in the region.”

Williamson, who earned her bachelor’s at Harvard University and her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts, grew up in Philadelphia, imagining a career in architecture. “I liked to draw and I liked to set up spaces and think about how to engineer a small space, and I liked to think about how people use spaces and feel when they’re inside spaces,” she says. “I went to college thinking I was very good at a lot of things, and something you learn [in college] is that there are people who are much better than you are at some of the things you think you were doing well. I found that art was something I really liked doing and could do well.”

When not teaching, mentoring, or contributing to the Faculty Senate’s curriculum committee, Williamson spends her time in South Orange, New Jersey, with her partner, Thomas Lidbetter, an assistant professor at Rutgers Business School. She also lives in West Hartford, where she and her colleague, Billie Lee, a Jackie McLean Fellow who teaches painting and drawing at HAS, are taking on another frequently ignored space.

“We’ve been working on a project that’s about mapping and creating a guidebook for people to examine shame and the places in their own life experience that they don’t generally go—or try to avoid going,” Williamson says.

The work, born in collaboration with Hartford dancer Arien Wilkerson, is meant to address the shuttered, PCB-contaminated John C. Clark Elementary School in Hartford’s North End. “Arien and another artist and I were all trying to think about how this school represents an anti-monument,” Williamson explains. “So, I have been continuing to work with Arien and Billie to figure out how that project takes shape, either as a dance or a textbook or forms that model things that might happen inside of school. [We want] to monumentalize and educate people around some of the themes that the school brings up, which I think are shame and problems of neglect, and how we care for— or fail to care for—certain spaces and certain people in our New England cities.”

Bringing the invisible to light is also a working theme for an escape room that Williamson and Cherokee Cowherd ’22 are collaborating on for Cowherd’s University Scholars project. It “was a project that I had made as an artist, but Cherokee is going to make it virtual, so we’ve been talking about how the escape room can be played online,” Williamson says. “The themes of the room are that it teaches from the lives of three women enslaved in colonial America: Phillis Wheatley, Tituba (the first woman accused of being a witch in Salem Village), and Sally Hemings,” whose life as the enslaved mother of four of Thomas Jefferson’s children is part of Williamson’s ongoing body of work.

Through the escape room, Williamson and Cowherd are focusing on “making the experience of contemporary black women visible, and challenging viewers to think about their own relationship to the past. [The project also draws] in elements of contemporary technology to get us to think about this idea of escape or not being able to escape,” Williamson says. “That’s been pretty exciting to work on, in addition to just teaching my integrated media classes and connecting with students.”

Making those connections with students while navigating a pandemic has not been easy, but Williamson has built a career on establishing relationships in unexpected circumstances. “During COVID, our students are going through so much,” Williamson— who taught in the classroom this past semester—observes. “I think, right now, this idea of how to listen to them and get to know them is actually very challenging, but also it’s exactly why I do what I do—to make them feel known.”

Photos by Corinne Thrash, UW College of Arts & Sciences

Photos by Corinne Thrash, UW College of Arts & Sciences