40 ACRES: Weeksville
Film, Photography, and Archival Documents
Sandy Williams IV
February 2nd – April 6th, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, February 2nd, 6 – 9pm
With an off-site Screening and In-Conversation with Leila Weefur
Co-presented with California College of Art
Friday, March 15th, 7:00pm
at CCA's Timken Hall, 1111 8th Street, SF, CA
Sandy Williams IV’s installation and film 40 ACRES: Weeksville documents an ephemeral sculpture and public performance in the sky above Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on Juneteenth, 2023. At the artist’s request, a skywriter traced the geographic borders of the historic Weeksville community in the sky—an area of roughly 492 acres—to honor the legacy of one of the first recognized free Black communities in the country, which occupied the location from 1838 to around 1930. The skywriting and its documentation pay homage to the memory of Freedmen communities, while addressing histories and forms of social oppression that often are paved over, by connecting current national inequities to the failures of Reconstruction in the United States after the Civil War.
40 ACRES: Weeksville was commissioned by The Shed (NYC) and debuted there in Fall, 2023, as part of the exhibition Open Call. The project was developed in collaboration with the Weeksville Heritage Center, and the flyover took place in conjunction with the Center’s Juneteenth Food Festival. The project also has been generously supported by the University of Richmond.
INSTALLATION DOCUMENTATION AND FILM STILLS
ABOUT THE ARTIST
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 the hidden legacies of public spaces. Through ephemeral, malleable, and collaborative public memorials, Williams’ work unsettles popular 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.
Past exhibitions include solo shows at 1708 Gallery (Richmond), the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington (Ontario), Reynolds Gallery (Richmond), and Second Street Gallery (Charlottesville), along with group exhibitions and performances at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Virginia Beach, The Arlington Museum of Contemporary Art, The Harnett Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU,Socrates Sculpture Park (NYC), New Release (NYC), de boer Gallery (LA),Springsteen (Baltimore), NADA House (NYC). Artist in Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (FL), SOMA (CDMX), ACRE (Chicago), Mildred’s Lane (NY) and the University of Cumbria (UK).
They were the recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Artist Fellowship, along with the New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship. They hold an MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, and teach as Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Richmond.