Sculptor exhibiting in Hinson Art Museum turns crayons into fine art

WINGATE — Remember the feeling of possibility that overwhelmed you the first time you opened a brand new 64-pack of Crayolas? Artist Herb Williams has never gotten over it. Instead, he’s taken crayon-creativity to the next level. His work will be exhibited in Wingate University’s Hinson Art Museum starting Wednesday, Feb. 23. And thanks to a partnership between Unionville Elementary, the Union County Community Arts Council and the University, some 50 fifth-graders will get to experience Williams’ passion for the creative process firsthand.

Contributions from Wingate’s 2021 One Day, One Dog donor drive helped the University’s Art Department purchase Williams’ “The Ripple Effect” for the museum’s permanent collection and arrange for his artist talk. Unionville teacher Eric Hinson, a 1995 Wingate alumnus, then arranged for members of the school’s art club to attend the event. To further inspire the young artists, the Union County Community Arts Council will supply each one with a box of crayons and a sketch pad.

“Crayons are a gateway drug. To most adults, the sight and smell of crayons produce specific memories of childhood,” Williams says. “The twist in the road to nostalgia is the creation of a new object from a medium in which it was not intended.”

Although he’s always loved crayons – he carried his around in a fruitcake tin as a child and now orders single-color cases from Crayola of 3,000 at a time – it wasn’t until the early 2000s that he realized they were truly his vehicle. Growing up in Alabama, Williams carved sculptures into the red clay of hillsides, his own temporary Mount Rushmores. As a teen, he worked in construction and took his growing understanding of form and materials to Birmingham-Southern College, where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture. From there, he worked at a bronze foundry in Florida, helping cast hundreds of sculptures prior to moving to Nashville in 1998.

Williams received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Museum Purchase Grant in 2004 and the Next Star Artist Award in 2008. He earned a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2011 and was commissioned in 2019 to provide artwork for a wing of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

Although some of his well-known works include melted crayons, Williams’ most distinctive creations are not molten but formed from crayons in their original form. He cuts the sticks down to the length he needs and then bonds them to a form he has carved or cast, completely enveloping it.

“Whether I use the tips or the butts of the crayons will change the look of it, make it more kinetic or more illustrative,” Williams explains in an episode of Nashville Public Television’s “Tennessee Crossroads.”

“There is such promise in that little box of crayons that everybody gets because there are so many possibilities before you even put one to the paper. And that’s a lot of what drove me to work with the whole stick of the crayon, because when you put it on the paper it is never as saturated and rich and thick with pigment as it is in that stick. There is just something so primally satisfying about working with it and working with hundreds of thousands of them.”

It’s that satisfaction of creating something new and unexpected from an everyday object that Wingate’s visual arts coordinator Charlene Bregier hopes Williams will spark in students in her Art 404 Creative Process class.

Williams initially took more than four months and 40,000 crayons to sculpt “The Ripple Effect,” a brightly striped deer drinking from a similarly colored pool, part of his nature-inspired Call of the Wild exhibit. Williams says his use of the same spectrum of colors in the pool and the animal speaks to the idea that the simple act of drinking from a source has deeper significance than the human eye can perceive.

“I’m really interested in the idea that there’s more happening right in front of us that we just are too busy or too distracted to notice,” he says. “There’s this condition called synesthesia, where you hear a sound and see a specific color. It got me to explore the notion that nature and the animal kingdom use a higher-functioning form of synesthesia in every simple thing they do.”

Although he melted crayons to create a finished surface look on his original work, the piece he will bring to Wingate is one he created specifically for the University with the same sculpture form but using the unmelted crayon tips. He’s also altered the colors a bit, Bregier says, leaving the top portion of the deer white, with the colorful spectrum beginning at the top of the legs.

As excited as she is about adding the sculpture to the collection, it’s the interaction between Williams and students that she looks forward to most.

“With our increasingly diverse population, including many low-income and first-generation college students, access to art through Hinson Art Museum artwork, artists and exhibits is something many may have never had the chance to experience,” Bregier says.

Similarly, Williams says that crayons keep him connected to his own blue-collar roots.

“There weren’t any museums in my town. I don’t think I walked into a gallery until I was in college,” he told Nashville Arts Magazine. “I want to give a window to a lot of people with humble beginnings that will enable them to smile at something and to want to approach it, and open doors for them to embrace more in the art world.”

Williams’ talk, set for 2 p.m. on Wednesday, is free and open to the public. The museum is located next to the Batte Center at 403 N. Camden Road, Wingate, NC 28174.