Pick of the Week: Kiyan Williams Hammer Museum

As my feet touch the terrain of compact, glittering soil that covers the floor of the Hammer Projects space, it feels as if I’m stepping into another realm, another planet even. Kiyan Williams’ solo exhibition, “Between Starshine and Clay,” curated by Erin Christovale, presents a new kind of land art–a sort of archeology of ruins. The artist began collecting earth from ancestral sites in an effort to piece together their own familial heritage. Williams understands soil as vibrant organic material that harbors collective meaning related to Black American histories and identity. Attuned to the spiritual and metamorphic qualities of land and soil, Williams’ practice is echoed in Katherine McKittrick’s claim that “black matters are spatial matters.” In mapping a kind of Black geography that considers diasporic histories and subjects often regarded as “ungeographic”, McKittrick emphasizes the “spatial practices Black women employ across and beyond domination and the ways in which geography, although seemingly static, is an alterable terrain.”