Levester Williams, let liberty be, 2025
Levester Williams sets LED text within layers of plexiglass, transforming the glow of moving signage into a site of contemplation. Drawing from his encounter with LED-screen trucks weaponized to dox community members amid campus activism opposing the Palestinian genocide, he reclaims this tactic of public amplification to reflect on what it means to see and be seen within public space. Through this reclamation, Williams frames liberty not as an abstraction but as an inheritance embodied and shared. By evoking his grandmother’s hot water cornbread—a dish rooted in Black resistance and ingenuity—he points to how memory, nourishment, and daily ritual shape our understandings of political discourse, access, and power.
The work’s transparency ensures that city and self are never outside the frame. To encounter it is to see liberty refracted through skyline, stranger, and one’s own reflection, reminding us that our frameworks of freedom are formed in relation to others. As it moves through Philadelphia’s neighborhoods and thoroughfares, the piece transforms the city itself into a shifting backdrop, situating liberty within an ever-evolving network of places, relationships, and personal stories.
At This Table is on view November 7th-December 13th, 2025 at Heim Center for Cultural and Civic Engagement at the Parkway Central Library.
Materials: LEDs, acrylic, steel
Levester Williams (b. Lansing, MI) is a sculptor whose praxis is deeply rooted in aesthetic and critical inquiries into modes of existence and existing. Questions arising from the politics and poetics of identity, space/place, and boundary congeal into forms of sculptures, installations, drawings, sound, code, and the moving image.
Williams received a MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, Master of Computer and Information Technology from University of Pennsylvania and BFA in Art and Design from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. His works have been included in exhibitions at San José Museum of Art, San José, CA; N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI; Institute for Contemporary Art, Richmond, VA; and, among others, Museum of African Design, Johannesburg, South Africa. His selected residencies include Skowhegan's School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, Maine; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont; and the Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Lead support for the Monument Lab Artist Residency is provided by the William Penn Foundation, with additional support from Urban Art Projects (UAP) and the Ogilvie Family Foundation.
Image Credits: Levester Williams, let liberty be, 2025, Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia PA, At This Table: A Monument Lab Residency Exhibition (Photography: Steve Weinik).