KIYAN WILLIAMS

Kiyan Williams is an artist from Newark, NJ and based in New York City. Working fluidly across sculpture, installation, performance, and interventions in public space, their practice traces legacies of dispossession and diasporic subjectivity embedded in the landscape and built environment. With a sensitivity to the relationship between material and place, and informed by architecture, archaeology, and ecology, Williams’ practice attunes us to the histories that hum beneath the surface of the soil. In their elemental works the earth and weather are both protagonists and collaborators.

Williams’ debut institutional solo exhibition, Between Starshine and Clay, was presented at the Hammer Museum. In 2022 they presented a public sculpture in New York City commissioned by Public Art Fund in the exhibition Black Atlantic. They were included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing.Their work has been featured in recent group exhibitions The Hirshhorn, ICA Boston, The Baltimore Museum of Art, MIT Vera List Center, and Paula Cooper Gallery. Williams is the recipient of the Jerome Hill Fellowship, the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, Franklin Furnace Fund, and Graham Foundation Grant. Their works are held in numerous public collections including: The Hammer Museum, The Hirshhorn, Baltimore Museum of Art, and others. Williams earned a BA with honors from Stanford University and an MFA from Columbia University.