Harriet Series #5 By Antoinette Ellis-Williams

Harriet Series #5, 2023, Mixed Media on Digital Collage Acrylic Print 11”x16”

Harriet Tubman is my muse. Her willingness to liberate people because of a shared history is one we need to remember. In this work I reimagine her ordinary in saint, black, poor and woman.

Dr. Antoinette Ellis-Williams is Chair and Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at New Jersey City University. Ellis-Williams is an emerging Jamaican born multi-media interdisciplinary abstract contemporary artist, playwright, scholar, and poet. Her public art is in Newark Airport Terminal A and has also appeared in the Newark Artist Collaboration with Audible.  She has had solo exhibitions at the Visual Art Gallery at NJCU and Moody-Jones Gallery. Her work has appeared at Newark Museum of Art, NJ State Museum, Morristown Performing Arts Center with Art in the Atrium, Consulate General of Greece in NYC, Akwaaba Gallery, Museum of Science, and Industry in Chicago, Ill, Prizm Art Fair, and many other venues. She is the author of Black Gardenias: A Collection of Poems, Stories, & Sayings from A Woman’s Heart (Semaj Publishing, 2013).  She She is a playwright and actor of Scarf Diaries. Her one-woman play premiered at NJPAC in 2017 and at reg. e gaines’ 2021 Downtown Urban Art Festival in NYC. Scarf Diaries won BEST play. Ellis-William’s documentary Lee Hagan: Connecting Generations (2016) won best short documentary at the Newark Black Film Festival. Her TedX Talk Finding Justice in the Land of the Free (2015) tried to unpack her immigrant status in America. She has presented papers at Oxford, Harvard, Rutgers, Seton Hall, Princeton, to name a few. She is a highly sought after public speaker and minister. She is a graduate of Seton Hall University (BA), University of Pittsburgh (MPA) and Cornell University (Ph.D).Her work explores the layers of her own identity—blackness, girl/womanhood, mother, and immigrant—in the context of popular culture, power, politics, religion/faith, history, music, social movements, and socioeconomics. The work is a commentary on the textured lives of marginalized people. She creates as a way of unpacking rage, pain, contradictions, beauty, agency, and joy constantly trying to understand the complex history and narrative of blackness in the United States and black the diaspora.