Fifteen Friends

Hand-poured paper with newspaper clippings and text fragments embedded in wet pulp, re-torn and modified with additional pulp. Names written on handmade flax paper with gold leaf on gum ammoniac, embedded in or glued to the poured paper at various stages; string embedded in the poured paper and then tied to flax-paper pieces.

This piece was dedicated to 15 friends William lost to AIDS by the late 1980s. William wrote an article about it in Calligraphy Review

This piece text includes names of friends dead of AIDS, and a single sentence that came to me as I was conceiving the piece. The irregular, muddy colored paper with its half-buried headlines, stories, and death notices conveys the emotional impact of living in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. Against this background the simply-lettered names were written to convey love and respect and are also restful to the eye and heart. I created a piece with strong visceral impact, one in which the verbal element was central and yet which did not require the viewer to shift to a reading mode. The string suggests both the oppressiveness of the epidemic and the connections between people that have grown as a result of it.

— William Stewart

A few experts on Williams work took note in 2021 that Fifteen Friends has greatly disintegrated in the approximately 35 years, despite being kept away from any direct light source. A short discussion between friends posit their belief that William, a brilliant, thoughtful artist, entirely familiar with artwork materials—those that are archival and those that are not—must have almost certainly chosen a newsprint background material that would rapidly decline, as a metaphor for how the AIDS epidemic so quickly destroyed (hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States and globally.)

— Janaia Donaldson