KIYAN WILLIAMS Kiyan Williams is a multidisciplinary artist from Newark, New Jersey working fluidly across performance, painting, sculpture, and video. Kiyan earned a BA from Stanford University and is an MFA candidate at Columbia University. Their work has been exhibited at SculptureCenter, The Jewish Museum, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, and more. Williams was selected to participate in the 2019 In Practice emerging artist exhibition at SculptureCenter and is among the inaugural cohort of artists commissioned by The Shed, a new art space in NYC. They were invited to re-perform Bruce Nauman’s “Wall-Floor Positions” at MoMA and PS1 for the artist's recent retrospective. Currently, Williams is a fellow at the Leslie-Lohman Museum.
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Dirt Eater, 2019 Sculpture Soil, clay, steel, patina, bricks, wax, kanekalon, incense, mycelium, wood and steel armature 72" × 36" × 36" Photo: Kyle Knodell Installation view, In Practice: Other Objects, SculptureCenter, New York, 2019 N E X T S P R E A D, C LO C K W I S E FROM TOP LEF T
kiyanwilliams.com
Dirt Eater (Detail), 2019 Sculpture Soil, clay, steel, patina, bricks,
My recent body of work unearths diasporic histories and trans/gressive subjectivities. I excavate soil and debris from sites of loss within the Black Diaspora: the ruins of slave castles and sugar plantations, the last addresses of my great grandmother who migrated from St. Croix to Harlem in 1934, and a low-income residential building in West Harlem demolished by Columbia University. To borrow the words of Saidiya Hartman, “I am intent on tracing an itinerary of destruction.” Working primarily in sculpture, video, and perfor mance, I am attracted to materials that are silent witnesses to the historical and ongoing dispossession of Black people in America.
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wax, kanekalon, incense, mycelium, wood and steel armature 72" × 36" × 36" Photo: Kyle Knodell Installation view, In Practice: Other Objects, SculptureCenter, New York, 2019 Patron Saint of the Boy Girls, Banji Cunts, and HoodFags, 2018 Sculpture Soil, human hair, wooden beads, candles, incense, moss, mycelium 60" × 36" × 24" Dirt Eater, 2019 Video Still HD Color Video with sound 07:29 minutes
