Conjure and Creativity: Women and Divinity in Visual Art by Nedra Theriot Williams
African American Museum and Library
659 14th St, Oakland
“Influenced by the history of my culture, I choose to embrace the aesthetic and spirituality of the African Diaspora. That choice is neither limiting nor exclusive.”
Nedra Williams’ mixed media art works, on display beneath the towering gilded ceilings and alongside permanent historical installations on the African American Museum and Library’s second floor, weave human touch and the natural world, (nearly) all neatly contained within the confines of not-super-large frames.
“Earth, spiritual forces, and [my] cultural heritage” inform Williams’ pieces, her process “a jazz inspired rhythm of symbolic repetition…figures and brushstrokes.” This blending of styles, materials, and inspirations lend the works layered intrigue, a need for the viewer to peer ever closer to determine just what that one stroke, or article of clothing, or cowrie shell, is made of.
Williams’ collage aesthetic holds strong throughout, but her most effective use of photographed faces on built bodies is Truth Tellers. The black and white photos integrate fluidly into their collaged and patchworked whole, the sketched-out clothing and brightly abstracted background a natural marriage. Beside them, two shadowed figures intertwine, one cartoonishly crowned, the other a mirror of its mate. The curve of a buttcheek seamlessly transitions between the two halves, the L of their entanglement perhaps seen by the knowing expression of the woman above them. A pasted sun, or moon, or other worldly planet, hangs above them all, a soft and watchful eye.
With pieces from as far back as 2008 through creations completed this calendar year, clocking the artist’s evolution of color and spatial positioning was a fun surprise. Clear through lines of motif, technique, and material kept the selections cohesive, and the power of some of the newer works was highlighted by their prior, perhaps less fully realized cousins. Earlier works, such as Orosun Meji (2008), offer a fantastical, high-octane, full-spectrum colorful world to romp through slowly, to take in each detail and delight, while more recent pieces such as Olokun’s Mystery (2025, pictured at top), makes use of many of the same elements, but presents them in a more subdued and airier context.
With the backdrop replaced by white and a simple yellow sky and green grass in place of complex underwater worlds, the figures are now given far more space to breathe, to move, to pray or yearn or just generally be in one another’s orbit—no obfuscating frond or fauna to distract from the humanness. The delicacy of the media’s placement, too, affects this airy quality, this sense of openness, space, and room for breath. Splashes of coffee-brown collide with cobalt, abruptly end in a piece of black paper, a copper sheet, an intricate batik print.
Seeing Through Time (2024) and Self Portrait (2025) loudly called out in their sparseness as well. Locked in an entrancing conversation with each other, despite laying flat on the same wall, the piercing gaze of the time seer’s pea-green eyes able to move beyond traditional directions to speak to the self portrait. Side eyes for the win. More jaunty, assuredly not-careless splashes of brown and iron pigments, delicate black patterning, and cowrie shells adorn these figures and their vessels, the pleasantly disfigured forms seeming to move toward one another despite their separate worlds.
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