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 the 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 has been the subject of solo presentations at the Hammer Museum, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, and Art Omi. They were included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing. Their work has been featured in exhibitions presented by Public Art Fund, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, ICA Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, among numerous others. Williams is the recipient of the Jerome Hill Fellowship, the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and the Graham Foundation Grant. Their work is held in numerous public collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Hammer Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Grinnell College, and Pitzer College. Williams earned a BA with honors from Stanford University and an MFA from Columbia University.