Description

Over the past forty years artist William Earle Williams (born 1950) has made sites of African American history more visible through his exquisite photographs. Mentored in the 1970s by the famed photographer Walker Evans, who had a home in Lyme, Williams attended the Yale School of Art at Evans’s suggestion. From that Connecticut inception, Williams embarked on a decades-long journey to identify and photograph places across the country that hold histories of enslavement, the Underground Railroad, and emancipation. Many remain unmarked and largely overlooked in a society that has long ignored Black history. Williams returned to Connecticut in 2011 to visit the Florence Griswold Museum’s exhibition The Exacting Eye of Walker Evans. At that time, he made photographs of alleged sites of the Underground Railroad on Lyme Street.