Discipline: Visual Art – painting

Sandy Williams IV

Discipline: Visual Art – painting

Region: Richmond, VA

MacDowell Fellowships: 2024

More: www.sandywilliamsiv.com

Ten bronze bars in a row leaning against a wall. The bars read "1 SECOND" and "1 MPH" in repeating intervals.

00:10 (To Remember the Murder of Eric Garner) - 00:10 (To Remember the Murder of Eric Garner) is composed of ten bronze Time Rulers. Each Time Ruler measures the distance of one second at one mile per hour (i.e. at one mile per hour, 17.6 inches can be traversed in one second). On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner, a 43- year-old African American man, was murdered in the New York City borough of Staten Island by Daniel Pantaleo, a New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer, after the latter put him in a prohibited chokehold while arresting him. Video evidence shows Garner was held in a chokehold for 10 seconds, while repeatedly stating, “I can’t breathe”, before losing consciousness. He was pronounced dead an hour later, and no officers were ever charged with his murder. This installation of 10 bronze Time Rulers is meant to hold the weight of this tragedy as memorial in our collective conscience.

a collage of images: a cloud drawing against a clear blue sky, people looking up in amazement, informational pamphlets (one framed and several a neat pile on the floor), archival images in a lit vitrine and a projected film hanging in the background.

40 ACRES: WEEKSVILLE - Weeksville, was a multilayered public performance that took place in the sky above Crown Heights, Brooklyn on June 19th, 2023. A skywriter traced the borders of the historically Black Weeksville community—an area 492.72 acres in total—above where Weeksville once was, to honor the legacy of this neighborhood, one of the first recognized free Black communities in the country, which occupied the location from 1838 to around 1930. This skywriting pays homage to the memory of Freedmen communities and acknowledges histories and social oppressions that are often unseen and paved over, by connecting current national inequities to the failures of Reconstruction in the United States after the Civil War. The flyover took place in partnership with the Weeksville Heritage Center’s Juneteenth Food Festival. 40 ACRES: Weeksville was commissioned and exhibited by The Shed as part of Open Call. While the skywriting performance was ephemeral, it survives in video, archival, and photographic documentation. This work was exhibited at The Shed in New York City, Telematic Arts, in San Francisco, and The Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn.

Three framed portraits in a row depicting the artist, their mother, and their grandmother; all riding horses in different terrains.

I Get It From My Mama I - These photographs of my grandmother, my mother, and myself; respectively, were taken in Virginia, over a period of many decades, and three generations. They are Virginia history, an unkept history, depicting the way my matrilineage of Black women used to ride horses in the same manner so many patriarchal figures sit atop monuments. These portraits now serve as a visual record, revealing traces of our stories - both culturally and visually - of our origins, our use of space, our physical features, and our existence. Put differently, these portraits reveal clues to the past, and relate the development of a family to the development of a land. The portrait of my grandmother was taken in situ. She rode her horse Silver often to carry out her familial chores growing up, and in the background you see the thick woods of the land she grew up on. In contrast, my portrait was taken on a well-kept farm, complete with a white picket fence, and someone to hold the horse I’d just met.

A collage of images: A large white wax sculpture of the Lincoln Memorial sitting on a base in front of a brick building, the same sculpture heavily melted, a group of teachers and adults standing around the sculpture, and various images of people lighting the available wicks on the sculpture.

40 ACRES: CAMP BARKER (Free Wax III) - 40 ACRES: CAMP BARKER (Free Wax III) was produced in partnership with CulturalDC and the District of Columbia Public Arts Building Communities Grant. For this installation we produced a 6ft tall wax replica of the Lincoln Memorial that was temporarily installed at Garrison Elementary School from September 2023 to August 2024. This project highlighted the legacy of Camp Barker, a Civil War Era Freedmen community –or contraband camp– established in 1862 on the space where Garrison Elementary school now sits. At its height, Camp Barker housed roughly 4,000 people, and was one of the largest camps in the D.C. area. The installation of this large Lincoln Wax Monument gave students and community members the opportunity to touch, mold, melt and be a part of this American history that has been obscured by the ways we hold Lincoln’s legacy. 40 ACRES: CAMP BARKER made global headlines in June of 2024, when a DC heatwave melted the sculpture beyond recognition. While this was not the original plan, this result further contextualized the ways that the failures of the US Reconstruction Era live in our contemporary world, from global inequalities to climate disasters.

Sandy Williams IV is an artist and educator whose work generates moments of communal catharsis. Their conceptual practice uses time itself as a material and aims to unfold legacies hidden within popular historical narratives. Through ephemeral, malleable, and collaborative public memorials, Williams’ work unsettles colonial logics of permanence, uniformity, and displacement.

This work creates participatory paths for communal engagement informed by targeted research and site-specificity: holding space for disenfranchised public memories and visualizing frameworks of emancipation and shared agency.

Portrait by Johnny Fogg

Studios

Cheney

Sandy Williams IV worked in the Cheney studio.

Cheney Studio was given to MacDowell by Mrs. Benjamin P. Cheney and Mrs. Karl Kauffman. Like Barnard Studio, Cheney is a low, broadly massed bungalow. Sited on a steep westward slope, its porches are supported on wooden posts and fieldstone with lattices. Although it still retains its appealing character, the original design of the shingled building…

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Sandy Williams IV

Studios

Cheney

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