“Offline: Tracing the Source”, an art exhibition at Pyramid Atlantic in Hyattsville through March 29, arrived at a time when AI-generated art is polarizing. 

But it was in using AI that artist Hadiya Williams says she had a breakthrough in visualizing her matrilineal line and uncovering pieces of her cultural roots. 

The Hyattsville gallery exhibiting her show is layered with colors, patterns and shapes on 32 AI-generated giclees – fine art prints – as well as hand-built ceramics and hand-pulled prints and textiles, all contributing to a moving display of Williams’s ancestral index.

Williams was heavily inspired by the Great Migration, a movement of about 6 million Black people to the Northwestern states at the apex of a Jim Crow South. 

“It’s foundational because I am a product of it,” she said at a gallery talk Feb. 14. “I was thinking about the women who journeyed and traveled, the women who labored, and thinking about my grandmother.” 

In 2023, Williams was exploring Midjourney, an AI tool that creates images with specific prompts. With the migration on her mind, she said she envisioned her matrilineal lineage and generated visuals that she’s never “seen anything like before.” The real turn, though, was when Williams blended her own ceramic work into the images.

“I wish I could recall that feeling, but it opened up something inside of me that I couldn’t describe.”

Her view on AI is nuanced; however, Williams says she will not be using AI in her work going forward due to increasing controversy.

Still, what she created with her imagination, collective memory and technology is what moderator  Zoma Wallace described as an “exhibition [that] exemplifies the best of ways possible when human artistry and well-intentioned imagination are in dialogue with AI.”

Curator Anika Hobbs described the exhibition as a journey. Hobbs intentionally arranged the space to gradually build as you walk through it. It starts with graphic design and ends with an immersive living room installation. “You start to understand the colors and the lines … and then you start to see the hand-cut paper, and you see it in the clay … [and] it starts to get more and more three-dimensional. It starts coming off the wall,” Hobbs said.

“You walk through her portal, and you come into an actual reality of her work and her pieces,” she said. “Everything is hers.”

Williams was born and raised in D.C., describing growing up in a Black city as another foundational influence shaping how she sees the world. She also drew inspiration from her Cameroonian roots, specifically in her use of red clay dirt, which is “iconic in the African American experience,” according to Wallace.

Williams and Hobbs also found meaning in matriarchal womanhood. “Her mother came up so much that it made me sit back and think about my own, and how I can also honor them in this space,” Hobbs said. Williams described her mother as the “core” of her inspiration.

Williams said the meaning of the name “Offline” is her need to take a break from social media to focus on other important things. And “Tracing the Source” is honoring her ancestors; she even incorporates her grandmother’s actual names in her titles. “I named a lot of the work in the show after my own lineage.”

“Offline: Tracing the Source” represents exactly that: a call to Williams’s roots through an immersive, expressive mode, proving that AI and art are not adversaries but can coexist quite beautifully.

Through March 29. Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, 4318 Gallatin Street, Hyattsville. Wednesday–Thursday 10am–8pm; Friday–Sunday 10am–6pm.

Liad Mussaffi is a student at the University of Maryland studying journalism and business.