THE SUNDAY PROFILE : The Image Maker : The work of photographer and installation artist Pat Ward Williams has a way of peelinga subject down to its essential core.

The only thing standing between Pat Ward Williams and her happiness is a tree.

It’s not even a particularly daunting tree. Just a shaggy palm--one of the squat, stumpier types found in plentiful clusters throughout the plaza of Downtown’s newest conversation piece, the all-grown-up and streamlined Los Angeles Convention Center.

Yet said tree is eclipsing one view of Williams’ work. A photographer and installation artist, she has been dreaming into shape for the last 2 1/2 years a $250,000 piece commemorating the late city councilman and original convention center booster--”The Emperor of the Great 9th”--Gilbert W. Lindsay.

Two workmen, with boombox blaring a string of new-wave oldies, carefully fit large tiles into place, constructing an all-seeing, all-knowing dot-screen image of Lindsay that will be replicated on a trio of three-sided, 10-foot-high pillars. Scattered on the larger images, like a celebratory spray of confetti, are smaller hand-colored photos baked into postcard-sized tiles.

Williams rolls with the day’s distractions, and this afternoon has many. A convention center PR team pops by to tape the monument’s progression for a promotional video. “I did the Hollywood thing,” Williams confesses, shrugging, “put the tile in without grout. Painted with a dry brush.”

And earlier, a pre-informed nomad had scuffled by, buttonholing Williams. “(He) said aliens were going to land here and I really shouldn’t put anything in this plaza,” the artist says, shaking her head. “You know. Downtown .”

With that, Williams rises from her concrete seat in the shade. Legs spread, arms akimbo, hands folded into fists and planted firmly on hips, she considers the space.

She isn’t watching the workers.

No, she’s doing silent battle with the foliage. Jaw set, head cocked, she stares the tree down.

The stance says this: If not by crane or bulldozer, Pat Ward Williams will move that tree by sheer will--if she has to.

*

Williams, 47, a Philadelphia native, came to Los Angeles five years ago to teach at California Institute of the Arts--just in time to sit as audience for the city’s more dramatic performance pieces: floods, civil unrest, earthquakes. But she is unfazed, having stared down the emotional equivalent or worse.

A 1994 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in photography, she has come out of the gate at a quick pace and with a sustained stride. Her piece “32 Hours in a Box . . . and Still Counting,” part of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s highly controversial “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art” show, will open at the UCLA/Armand Hammer museum next month.

And all systems appear to be go for an exhibit, “Cultural Explainers: Portals, Bridges, Gateways,” that will at once broadcast and celebrate contributions of the city’s ethnic/racial communities. Sponsored by the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), Williams’ portion of the project should get under way later this year.

Even with her work in collections coast to coast--including the Whitney and the private cache of Peter and Eileen Norton--Williams considers her bread and butter a teaching post at UC Irvine, where she is an associate professor of art.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that she finds the hours to develop projects. One piece she’s ruminating over will be part of L.A.-based community curator Cecil Fergerson’s “African American Representations of Masculinity Exhibition.”

Much of the work lately is immersed in the tricky maze of perception and the inherent fallibility of memory. The entire body of work is largely her spirited retort to pervasive media images stereotyping African Americans. “It’s just one of the things,” Williams says, “that I dance out in the middle of the night.”

Until very recently, the formidable workload didn’t seem to trouble Williams. But a recently diagnosed liver infection has slowed her. She canceled a trip to Johannesburg for the South African Biennial as well a conference or two. To heal, she takes midafternoon naps, drinks bucket-sized vessels of liquids, eats leafy greens. But she’ll concede only so much.

Turning toward the workmen, who have begun stacking away their tools for the day: “See ya’,” she shouts with a wave. “I’m bringing my lawn chair tomorrow.”

*

For Williams, it has always been do it all--and do all of it at once.

“She has so much to say,” says Thelma Golden, curator of the Whitney show in New York. “About photography, about journalism, about American history, about the records of horrific times. Pat, I think, has always been interested in dealing with history . . . and how we deal with images.”

Readily acknowledging its limits, Williams searches her memory for her beginnings, to explain just how a passing fancy turned career. “My introduction to photography was when my husband gave me a camera. This is going back,” she says, stirring an iced coffee, a piece of art itself in a slender glass ringed with sea nymphs.

In the handful of weeks before last Friday’s scheduled unveiling of the Lindsay piece, Williams is getting to know Long Beach, her new home after a few years of boho living in a ocean-close studio sans kitchen in Venice (to the chagrin of her college-aged daughter). Taking a cafe-stroll down Pine Avenue, she has nixed tapas . A cafe-cum-art gallery inspired an exasperated eye-roll and sigh. Instead, she settles on Caribbean and a seat in the sun.

In the beginning, dabbling in photography was part of a pursuit of a larger artistic vocabulary that included ceramics and sketch classes. She cracked some of photography’s basic codes--darkroom and exposure essentials--during a special study session at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine. Up until then, she had viewed it as another hobby, sending her experiments to the local one-hour photo.

Williams ultimately decided to abandon the kiln and potter’s wheel to pursue photography full force. That is, until she became pregnant as a young bride. “It was like I couldn’t decide if I really wanted to be an artist or really wanted . . . a Mother Knows Best kind of thing.”

But Williams, who was then living in New Jersey, figured out how to blend and build on her newly acquired skills. She utilized mother-daughter moments by documenting Janaya’s first two years. “It gave me the opportunity to stay home with my baby . . . (and) really hone my craft.”

Williams sold her first prints during this period, but it would be some time before she could freely and proudly call photography a career.

But art school still translated as pipe dream in the Ward household. Williams, who comes from a long line of educators, knew that even the most compelling, well-illustrated pitch wouldn’t budge her parents.

“Looking back on it now from the perspective of being a mother, I think that I understand the reasons for my family taking the position that they did. They really wanted the best for me and we didn’t know anybody who was making any money being an artist. . . . They couldn’t imagine me being able to support myself.”

So Williams found herself redirected onto teacher-track--the sensible, safety-net profession for young women. But as she approached the final days of her studies, a signal went off--quietly at first. “My husband and I moved to New Jersey, so I was stopped short in that career,” she says. “And after I moved away and really wasn’t under the influence of my educator parents, I started to pursue art again.”

Later, its call became incessant.

In the late ‘70s, after moving back to Philadelphia with her husband, Williams rekindled friendships from Haystack. She recalls an evening of museum viewing and cultured chat, its details slowly shimmering up as if on emulsion:

“We were sitting in a car behind the museum . . . when all of a sudden this black guy ran in front of our car with his hands behind him and disappeared behind a wall.”

A policeman followed the figure into the night, disappearing behind the wall. “Then he came back out on the other side, and about 20 feet from the car, knocked the guy to the ground, knelt on top of his chest and blew his head off.”

Clear as a snapshot, Williams conjures it, punctuating the story with a shudder. “That, I think, was an interesting turning point in my life.”

The effect was twofold: It served as a horrifying civics lesson, underscoring gestating racial tensions in the city. It also provided an impetus.

Williams eventually testified against the officer, with some reservations. “It had been open season for black people in Philadelphia, all season.”

But the act of taking the witness stand inspired a personal epiphany. “It suddenly dawned on me that if I wanted to do anything with my art, I just oughta do it now. Because life is very tenuous.”

Within a year, Williams found her world upended. The policeman was acquitted, her marriage wavered and dissolved, and she enrolled in an undergraduate photography program. The sharp irony was that, despite her family’s warnings, it was art that sustained and supported her spiritually. It was art that made sense, kept her sane. “All of a sudden there seemed to be a great urgency to do this.”

At Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, Williams studied under such instructors as Judy Steinhauser, who introduced her to photo-processes that extended her personal vision.

Anne Fessler, a former faculty member at the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore, early on noted a trio of Williams’ passions. “Certainly, issues of identity, racism in America and family. A lot of her work is autobiographical,” says Fessler, who is now head of undergraduate and graduate photography at the Rhode Island School of Design.

“They are stories from her own family history. I think that she, like many women, believe that the personal is political, and operate out of that premise, and bring their own experience to bear on what they want to say about the world.”

Williams’ strength, Fessler says, is her facility in presenting intensely personal work that includes outsiders. “I think she speaks both to the specific concerns of an experience of African Americans, but she is able to speak about both that specific and the larger human condition at once.”

By taking on issues as amorphous and emotionally fraught as race and gender, Williams set forth on a path that is as ambitious as it is prickly. The journey sharpened her edges.

“Pat was relentless ,” recalls Leslie King-Hammond, dean of the graduate school at Maryland Institute. “Absolutely this relentless creative energy that was constantly searching, constantly challenging, constantly in need of finding a way to present a voice of clarity, and also confrontation. She was very good about posing the challenging vision.”

Williams’ work gravitated to the forefront, primarily because of its distinct voice, and the urgency of its issues.

Some of the photographs made at the Maryland Institute have, more or less, become Williams’ signature pieces, including “32 Hours in a Box . . . and Still Counting,” which commemorates Henry (Box) Brown, a slave who shipped himself to freedom in a box.

“Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock” is a probing study of a 1937 Life magazine photo of a black man who was tortured, then lynched. The work, which includes enlarged details of the photograph and handwritten text surrounded by tar paper, is a coded exploration of complicity, guilt and intent--not only of those who committed the act, but of the photographer, editor and even the viewer.

“She has a way of peeling an image down to its essential core, exposing the raw nerve,” King-Hammond says. “Just like chalk on a board. I don’t know anybody who can stand it. It squeaks and cuts right through you.”

All the while, however, Williams found herself frustrated with the form, the limitations implicit in a two-dimensional plane. In her work, above all, she sought to deconstruct stereotypes, particularly of African Americans. But she very often discovered that the viewer, no matter his or her color, came to the images with baggage--preconceived notions and ready-made judgments.

“She has as her basic thematic core the role and relationship of the image the media has . . . used to define the African American person,” King-Hammond says. “And one of her essential criteria is to challenge what that definition is doing. Who has the right to make the definition and who becomes accountable for it?”

But even with the camera secure in her own hands, street photography proved inadequate for her means. Despite efforts to bend form and perception--combining text (quotes, observations) with photography--she couldn’t control the images’ message, their ultimate effect.

“No matter what I did with these photographs, people had their own idea about who these people were,” Williams says. “And I was really disturbed. . . . But there was a tradition of taking photographs of black people that were sort of documentary anthropology, ethnology kind of photographs that had a subtext: ‘Look at the victim. Look how poor. Look how dirty. Look how undeveloped.’ I had to find out some way to counter that feeling. Or at least make somebody aware that there was something else happening in the photograph.”

The task, Williams admits, keeps her fluid, constantly decoding images, testing even her own preconceived notions. One such test occurred during a trip to Nigeria she made as a graduate student.

“We grew up with images of Tarzan or of Little Black Sambo, and you know, it wasn’t until the reawakening of Black Pride that we came up with another image of Africa.”

And even that one, Williams concedes, was idealized. “When I got there, I realized that neither one of those ideas was really truthful. That Nigeria was really a place with people with their own problems and identity and ideas.”

Williams hoped to capture the same variegated elements within African American culture--the faces, the stories, the collective histories--to arrange them in an indelible image that defied containment.

It is in this endeavor that Williams’ art serves as activism, and ultimately as emancipator.

“What You Looking At?” which appeared in the Whitney Museum’s 1993 Biennial, goes head to head with those lingering impressions. “The piece is about viewing distance,” Williams says. “Your perpetual distance from black men and who you think they are.”

Like the Lindsay memorial, it was made with a large dot-screen mural pattern, illustrating five blank-expressioned black men staring out at the viewer. A graffiti message snaking across the image provides a hint: “What you looking at?”--which, Williams says, “I think is perceived as a threatening message.”

At 25 feet or more, the viewer confronts these five black men and what appears to be an aggressive question. Closing the distance, the viewer takes in smaller, colored areas embedded in the larger image. Snapshots, portraits, candids that draw one closer.

“And as you get close you notice that these are smaller images of real black men, some of them labeled son and father. Husband, brother. And as you get closer, that larger bogyman image disappears and you are left with a declarative statement about what you’re looking at. This is what you’re looking at.”

This is not a art for art’s sake. “I think that it will only change when we have more images,” Williams says. “Our images seem to be so one-sided of black people, of black family, especially of black men. I think it’s evident if you think about the woman who drowned her children and blamed it on a black man. The man who killed his wife and blamed it on a black man. Everybody believed it. It was no big deal.”

Therefore, Williams’ agenda is never hidden. It is broadcast loud and clear.

*

In a larger sense, projects such as the Social and Public Art Resource Center’s “Cultural Explainers” will serve, figuratively, as a cultural round table, connecting community through exposure, education and, most fluidly, cross-pollination. Here, activism marries art.

“Like the name suggests, our goal is to explain each other’s cultures to promote a bit more harmony within the diverse cultures in Los Angeles,” Williams says, wincing a bit at the booster-speak. “I mean I hate saying that, but essentially that’s what we all have to do is get along. And not so much become a melting pot, but respect each other’s (cultures) with education and explanation.”

The project, a triptych of grand-scale proportions using L.A.’s busy patchwork as the inspiration and the medium, assembled three artists representing the Korean, Latino and African American communities. They will take a crack at constructing monuments to visually represent their respective community histories.

During the project’s first phase of community “speak-outs,” Williams listened carefully, relying on longtime residents and informal historians to be her eyes and ears--but most of all her conscience.

“We identified that South-Central was very much a euphemism,” Williams says in a slow, earnest tone. “Just like saying ‘inner city’ for ‘black people.’ We really do need to be very straight about what we’re doing and have a monument to people and their culture in the city.”

The desires were clear-cut, Williams discovered: “They wanted something that would not pigeonhole the African American community as just the well-known Central Avenue corridor with the jazz clubs and the night life. That type of history everyone is familiar with.”

Williams’ installation is based on Yoruba ancestral poles, “sort of like Civil War monuments that commemorate people and events or celebrate spirits in that particular town.” The dozen or more poles will be produced and exhibited in different pockets of black communities throughout the city.

Williams plans to use a junk-drawer of items, from rope, nails and old photographs to solar panels. “So that the piece would actually speak or sing or talk to you--powered by the sun. These poles would tell stories. Illuminate certain histories.”

Histories that would otherwise slip between the cushions.

Memories, recollections, oral histories and perceptions are the fluid, malleable tools that most fascinate and preoccupy Williams.

And it is the very same device with which she manipulates perceptions, the same one that has helped her to understand and ultimately explicate this city--even to itself. As with Gilbert Lindsay, “If you’ve only seen the official photo . . . you don’t know the man,” Williams says. “In some ways you have to come a little closer to the person and to the experience to get a more meaningful picture.”

That, too, could be a metaphor for Pat Ward Williams’ at-arms-length relationship with L.A.--fractured, daunting and difficult from a distance. The “official” city--impenetrable. “Very big,” Williams says, “and very impersonal.”

But her work, the act of art, of zeroing in on the tangible has made it, if only slightly, more manageable.

“Because of the type of work I do . . . the way I link personal history with an official history, I think that gives me a chance to really find out what the city is like in a more personal way. Catching up on a history of a city you missed. You get to hear people’s stories . . . or at least,” says Williams, the critical, questioning voice cutting through, “the many other sides of the story.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Pat Ward Williams

Age: 47.

Native?: No; born in Philadelphia, lives in Long Beach.

Family: Divorced. A grown daughter, Janaya.

Passions: Photography, Cuban culture.

On her personal battle against stereotypes: “It’s definitely daunting and you definitely feel discouraged but, then again, that’s the whole nature of struggle. I mean when we said this is a lifelong struggle, we’re really not kidding. You have to kind of devote your life to getting your images in. So at least they, if not counter, pose an alternative.”

On her parents’ reluctant acceptance of her art career: “It wasn’t until I got a photo in Time magazine that it was like: ‘Oh, my daughter the photographer.’ The fact that I actually got paid for that, and she could show something around the bridge party was some tangible evidence that something was going to happen.”

On “official history” versus “personal history”: “There are things . . . that cloud our perception. And when looking at family photographs, what you are trying to find is parallel personal history that runs alongside the official history. For example, everyone knows that officially Malcolm X was assassinated, but how that integrates into your personal life, and how that makes a difference in your life story, is really what the photograph is all about, and what it has to do with the history.”