Kiyan Williams, for their Whitney Biennial commission, recreated the column-lined facade from soil. Viewers can watch as it crumbles, sprouts plants and births insects.
A self-proclaimed alchemist, Williams specializes in transforming wet soil into hardened sculptures that typically live outdoors, where the wind carries seedlings that may attach to the artist’s creations and bloom. Often, Williams collects the earth from historically important sites of loss in the African diaspora: plantations of the American South, street corners where Black trans women were murdered or the banks of a river that became a thoroughfare for the domestic slave trade. The artist wants to give these painful histories a chance to regenerate, allowing life to flourish in the hostile conditions known by those who identify as Black, nonbinary, transfeminine.
