Antoine Williams - School of Art and Art History, University of Florida

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, graduate students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today’s conversation is with Antoine Williams, a multidisciplinary artist and assistant professor of drawing in the expanded field in the School of Art and Art History at University of Florida. His work has been exhibited across the United States and he’s held numerous fellowships and residencies in the arts.His interactive, multimedia, site-specific installation with Josiah Golson titled “Go to the tree and get the pure sap and find out whether they were right” is being exhibited at the Birmingham Museum of Art through early-July 2026. In this conversation, we discuss roots of his concern with Black life, the relationship between study and creative production, and the place of the arts in the Black Studies project.