Spanning performance, installations, video, and sculpture, Kiyan Williams’ practice adopts politically charged national symbols and subverts their meanings to question dominant narratives surrounding history, power, and US identity. This ranges from deep frying decommissioned US flags flown at the Capitol to earth sculptures composed of soil collected from sites that have witnessed the loss of Black life—slave castles, Southern plantations, demolished low-income residential buildings, and locations where Black trans women were murdered. Williams’ meditations on the social, ecological, and political conditions that shape the US empire tease out tensions between ruin and regeneration.

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ABOUT

Kiyan Williams is an artist based in New York City. Williams earned a BA with honors from Stanford University and an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University. Known for their immersive sculptural installations that transform monumental forms into earthen ruins, their practice challenges the conventions of traditional monumentalism and muddies the boundary between the built and natural environments. Their work has been exhibited across the country and internationally at the Brooklyn Museum, The Hirshhorn, Peres Projects, Altman Siegel, SculptureCenter, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Hammer Museum, and MIT Vera List Center. In 2022, they presented their first public artwork, Ruins of Empire, in New York City, commissioned by the Public Art Fund. Williams was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Even Better Than the Real Thing.

ACCESS INFORMATION: This program is free and open to the public. All programs include CART captioning. To learn about the other accessibility accommodations that were provide, please visit the accessibility page here.