Kiyan Williams, Unsettling the Histories of Public Sculpture

Installed in a grassy enclave near Pier 3 of the Brooklyn Bridge Waterfront Park (New York), Ruins of Empire by Kiyan Williams presents viewers with an oversized female figure constructed out of bits of hardened earth. The sculpture was created for Black Atlantic, an exhibition organized by the Public Art Fund (open May 17-November 27, 2022). With its title the show looks to the work of Paul Gilroy, who developed the transnational notion of the Black Atlantic in 1993 in order to theorize cultural identities whose history has been profoundly marked by the transatlantic slave trade.1 While the exhibition as a whole comprises various siteresponsive works that address aspects of Black experience in the United States, Williams’ piece offers a complex meditation on the history of monuments and public sculpture from a Black diasporic perspective.