Maternal love animates Heather Williams’ ‘Safe Passage’ exhibition at Kean University

An image from one of the videos in Heather Williams’ “Safe Passage in Conversation With Her Flowers” exhibition at Kean University.

Heather Williams approaches video art the way a TV showrunner might. She tells her wordless stories through a steady accumulation of images, each shot freighted with meaning, and each element in every frame meant to signify something relevant to her themes. Those who have gotten good at decoding the visual language of prestige television cinematography and its reliance on symbols ought to recognize the strategy. Williams understands emotional provocation; intellectual though she is, she knows the simple power of showing a child’s face. While everything she gives us in her short film loops is grounded in African-American history, there is a private and personal dimension to her narratives, too — one that presents her life, her story and her family in a manner that makes her struggle identifiable.

Williams, one of the smartest and most protean figures in Garden State art, is also very entertaining. Her paintings and mixed-media pieces are dramatic and kinetic, full of bright colors, pointed shapes, and snatches of provocative texts. Her terracotta busts of imagined ancestors are a righteous tribunal staring at us across history. To encounter them is to step into a high drama that has been running for centuries. The torn paper in her framed pieces is reminiscent of posters wheatpasted to city walls. Her sculptures seem to allude to the gravity of literary characters. Hers is a vision that operates in the world we know, even if her work has overtones of worlds we strain to remember.

There are a few pieces of Williams’s sculpture in “Safe Passage in Conversation With Her Flowers,” a solo exhibition installed at the Karl and Helen Burger Gallery on the campus of Kean University in Union. But mostly the show consists of six short videos shown on the walls of the space. None of these loops are very long, which is a blessing and a shrewd acknowledgment of the viewing habits of museum-goers. Most experimental video installations fail because they ask the audience to stand still for longer than people like to remain stationary in a gallery. Williams’ show isn’t like that. She expects you to move around, and she has designed her show so that wherever you look, you will encounter images that reinforce her themes.

A pair of shoes made by Heather Williams from fired clay, with an acrylic finish.

Those include billowing sheets that suggest makeshift sails, worn-out shoes and threadbare clothing, loose-woven burlap, chain link fences, skin, hair. Everything seems to be floating like featherweight objects strewn on calm waters. There is no immediate peril, but no sight of shore, either.

Williams also plies us with flowers: the sort of blooms associated with the tropics. Like Bony Ramirez, whose 2024 show at The Newark Museum used the cattleya orchid to stand for a cultural collision, Williams’ flowers situate the viewer in a dreamlike transition zone between The United States and The Caribbean.

Williams is interested in the rhythm of weaving, and her restless camera lingers on the spaces between threads. When one strand of burlap pulls away from a fraying swatch, she slows down to expose the dynamics of unraveling. The textiles she shows us are inexpensive, and therefore suitable for people living on the cheap — and sturdy, even as they are coming apart. They suggest canvas roofs, grandmothers’ gowns, ships at sail (for Williams, there is a nautical dimension to everything), and the connections between makers and those who are made by them. When Williams juxtaposes a strip of fabric with a braid of African-American hair, she is reminding us of how we were woven, how we have been weathered, and how we are holding together despite our innate frailty.

Now I’m making “Safe Passage in Conversation With Her Flowers” sound heavy-handed, and it isn’t like that at all. The symbolism in this show is thick, but it’s all tone-setting stuff, and Williams has a deft touch with it. Like good showrunners do, Williams knits together skeins of images in order to provide evocative backdrops for her characters — and those characters are where the action truly is. One loop features the artist’s mother, placid and wise in an outdoor scene in a place that doesn’t resemble the United States. But the real star of the show is Heather Williams’ child. Stand in the right place at the right time in this gallery and you might see three of him, on different screens at different ages, staring back at you with a look that combines defiance, vulnerability and pure incredulity.

An attendee watches a video in Heather Williams’ “Safe Passage in Conversation With Her Flowers” exhibition.

We would know it was the artist’s son even if she didn’t tell us it was in the statement. For one thing, Heather Williams appears, briefly, in one of the loops, and diaphanous as her image is, her resemblance to her kid is unmistakable. Beyond that, there is the powerful sense of maternalism that this show radiates. If you can look at the younger Williams on screen after screen — tough but frail in broad daylight, or forging a tenuous connection with a friend, or sheltered from the sky in a blanket-roofed structure that calls to mind a refugee’s skiff — and fail to feel any protective impulse, it is probably fair to say you’re not a parent.

Thus, there is a note of desperation in Williams’ appeal to ancestor spirits. She is acknowledging that she can’t do it on her own: The task of raising an African-American boy in a time of trouble is one too big, and too perilous, for any one person to handle. She is crossing her fingers that there is a force out there strong enough to guide the child on a challenging passage to adulthood — one that can only be understood in the context of centuries of discrimination and violence — and by mounting an exhibition like this, she is hoping that you yourself might find it in your heart to be a guide. “Safe Passage in Conversation With Her Flowers” is ultimately a challenge to the audience to see a child adrift on the currents of history and reach out our hands to help.

Because Williams is skillful and subtle, she draws us in with video trickery, including bold color inversions, substitutions and superimpositions, filmic sleight of hand and elisions between objects that resemble each other. It is possible to appreciate “Safe Passage in Conversation With Her Flowers” on a purely visceral level, marveling at the painterly quality of some of the shots, following the pretty colors and equally pretty faces. But it is clear that that is not all Williams wants. She’s got much more on her mind than that: history, travel, cultural collisions, and the responsibility she feels to be an ancestor herself.

In this crafty heartstring-tugger in the guise of an avant-garde installation, Heather Williams lets you know how high the stakes really are.

The Karl and Helen Burger Gallery at Kean University in Union will present “Safe Passage in Conversation With Her Flowers” through May 9. Visit galleries.kean.edu/exhibitions.