40 ACRES: Weeksville, 2023, Video (color, sound), 18 min
Written and Directed by Sandy Williams IV
Edited by Leila Weefur
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 acknowledging histories and forms of social oppression that are often 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.
Photography and Archival Documents
Installation Views
Installation view: Open Call 2023 Group Exhibition, The Shed, New York, November 4, 2023 – January 21, 2024.Commissioned by The Shed. Artwork © Sandy Williams IV. Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy The Shed.
Installation view: 40 ACRES: Weeksville, Solo Exhibition. Telematic Media Arts, San Francisco, CA. February 2, 2024 – April 6th, 2024
Other Associated Projects
As a sculptor, Sandy Williams IV has consistently engaged questions of monuments, history, and the memorialization of the African American experience. Frequently, their work has translated seemingly permanent icons into impermanent materials, dismantling racist confederate monuments and unearthing the complex histories too often obscured by American idols. 40 ACRES: Weeksville belongs to a series of connected projects that, to the contrary, map early free black communities whose histories have been overlooked or forgotten. And, recently, Williams was commissioned to produce a new, public bronze monument to enslaved laborers in Roanoke, Virginia, which is due to be completed in 2026. Below are images from a few of these projects.
The Fall (Lee), 2022. “The Fall Series” is an ongoing series of photographs documenting these small candle-like replicas melting in front of the monuments they were made after.
40 ACRES: Camp Barker, 2023.
40 ACRES: Chimborazo Park. 2022. Chimborazo Park is a territory fraught with complexities. The park briefly held a Confederate Hospital as well as a Freedman community that lived on the land for a year before being violently displaced by the city’s government. Along its topography and its soil lies the memory of a collective promise of renewed agency and reparations following a still incomplete abolition that was tied to the formation of Freedmen communities. That promise continues to whisper to us through layers of mediated displacement and forceful removal.
Melted Wax Monuments, 2021.
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