Kiyan Williams

Kiyan Williams (born March 6, 1991, Newark, New Jersey, United States) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores dispossession, diasporic subjectivity, landscape, and the built environment. Working across sculpture, installation, performance, video, and interventions in public space, Williams examines history, land, and power through earthen materials, monument reworking, and process-based forms that draw out what lies beneath official narratives.  Williams studied at Stanford University and later earned an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University. Their work often engages architecture, archaeology, ecology, public memory, and national symbolism, using soil, weather, unconventional materials, and sculptural fragmentation to consider how histories of subjugation, American identity, and environmental violence remain embedded in place.  Their work has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Art Omi, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Public Art Fund, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, ICA Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Brooklyn Museum. They have received the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and the Graham Foundation Grant. Kiyan Williams lives and works in New York City.