Scorporation | Aaron D. Williams

Betty and Howard Taylor Main Gallery 

Aaron D. Williams, also known as Aawful Aaron, is a Cleveland-based contemporary artist, designer, and CEO of Aawful Aaron Warehouse. As the co-founder of Young Cleveland Renaissance —an artist collective bridging Cleveland’s subculture and contemporary art scenes through visual art, music, film, and fashion —he is dedicated to fostering cultural renaissance through non-traditional community engagement.

Williams’ multifaceted artistic practice encompasses visual art, design, and curation, allowing him to challenge aesthetic and societal norms. Inspired by music, anime, sports, and his own lived experiences, he creates work that explores themes of social identity, mental health, competition, and othering. Primarily working in drawing, he employs layering techniques with colored pencils, markers, and mixed media, including technology and object-making, to create immersive, surreal imagery.

Williams invites viewers to envision what’s next in art, culture, and community through visual journeys encompassing dreamscapes, the subconscious, and real-life social issues. His work often depicts alternative universes and fever dreams, where individuals—particularly outsiders and outlaws—confront and navigate harrowing forces and systems. By illustrating processes of metamorphosis—humans and animals morphing into monsters, cyborgs, and otherworldly beings to adapt within these environments—his work reflects a universal will to survive, a nod to Afro-surrealism, science fiction, and his own lived experiences.

Williams’ artwork has been shown at MoCA Cleveland, SPACES, Cleveland’s City Hall, Cleveland Public Library, and the Riffe Gallery. Whether creating personal or commissioned projects, the underlying spirit remains consistent: to offer society’s outsiders a space for confrontation, catharsis, and community.

Continuing the Aawful Aaron (AAW) saga and serving as the second arc, Scorporation by Aaron D. Williams introduces new perspectives and conversations while using mixed media such as alcohol markers, colored pencil, print, and video. Scorporation touches on the overall approach, attitude, and ethos of how Williams operates creatively. The works combines the ideas of resilience and resourcefulness with the notion of turning oneself into an entity-like being as a survival tool in a hyper-capitalistic society. Highlighting how history stands as a testament to the conversations of today and, in connecting the dots to our identity, he hints at what’s to come.