Warm Water: New Works by Charles Edward Williams

Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts | Grand Rapids, Michigan

Warm Water is a collection of re-narrated visual works based on the event that sparked the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. These works unfold the story involving five Black teens, and what reportedly caused the death of Eugene Williams in Lake Michigan on the South Side of Chicago. The works document and shed light on the marginalizing oppositions the teens faced during the fragile height of racial sociopolitical conditions nationwide. This day, July 27, 1919, became the tipping point, and as a result, led to a string of violent race riots across the United States.

Warm Water references the psychological racial constructs and the human state of the five teens during the event, as well as the paralleled combination of chemical/water properties when hot and cold elements are combined. It is also the unsolicited landmark of the lake where the teens nicknamed the spot, Hot and Cold. With these two diverse complexities, re-appropriated and re-narrated visual explorations attempt to strike a balance between both past and present, from an incident later marked in history as Red Summer.