Sandy Williams IV

23, 100 Heartbeats (Time Travel VII), 2020

Oil on canvas, thread, 17.5” x 17.5”

ABOUT THE ARTIST

They are currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Richmond. Residencies include ACA (Florida), MassMOCA (Massachusetts), SOMA (Mexico City), ACRE (Chicago), The University of Cumbria (UK), among others. Recent exhibitions include Reynolds Gallery (Richmond), de boer Gallery (LA), Socrates Sculpture Park (New York), New Release (New York), Springsteen Gallery (Baltimore), Project Gallery V (New York), 1708 Gallery (Richmond), Guadalajara 90210 (Mexico City). Williams is currently exhibiting at the University of Richmond Museum, and at NADA House in NYC. Upcoming solo at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“I am an artist and educator based in Richmond, VA. My work is about the persistence of memory, the body, and resistance. My practice is in tasking audiences with agency, in order to generate both public and private opportunities for collaborative engagement. I am pursuing the threads that connect our diasporic origin stories to the official record, to our colloquial histories, and to the current crises that we now find ourselves in. This work helps root a social identify in the place that it comes from – the love, the ancestors, the loss, the land, the lies, the ideas, the repression, the representation, the violence – home. I make efforts in visualizing pathways towards the emancipation of our physical, conceptual, and emotional landscapes, and work both within and outside of the institution in order to clarify, to make transparent, to undo some of the temporal manipulations and spatial paradigms of oppression that exist in and all around us. I want to constantly reimagine of our potential as a society to promote healing as a cultural ideal. The work is persistence in opposition to permanence, to inspire functional histories for liberated social spaces in real-time. Williams graduated from the University of Virginia with a BA, and earned an MFA in VCUarts Sculpture + Extended Media department.“

—Sandy Williams IV