Emancipation Week keynote lecture featuring Sandy Williams IV

Join the Center for Studying Structures of Race for the Emancipation Week keynote lecture with Sandy Williams IV.

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.

While aesthetically Williams’ work flirts with minimalism, the practice is deeply
interdisciplinary, and carefully layers contextual research, communal activity, collaboration, civic
action, and performance. Their projects expand beyond the limits of the gallery toward public
space: places of education and worship, fashion, virtual portals, and even upward to the sky.
Williams’ work is guided by generations of freedom fighters who have dared to unsettle global
colonial practices and the visible and invisible structures that sustain them.

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