Kiyan Williams's NOTES ON DIGGING Premieres Sunday, July 12

Artist Kiyan Williams premieres their new project Notes on Digging as the seventh commission of The Shed's Up Close online series on Sunday, July 12 at 6 pm EST on The Shed's IGTV channel on Instagram (@theshedny).

For several years, artist Kiyan Williams has transformed their need to dig in and make art out of the earth into a ritual of care that has grounded them during the recent uprisings against anti-Black and anti-Black trans violence, all set against the backdrop of the government's much-criticized response to the COVID-19 crisis. Wiliams's video Notes on Digging explores how connecting with the earth helps the artist recover from this racialized and gendered violence. In a format similar to a video diary, Williams shares the process of researching and installing a new artwork called Reaching Towards Warmer Suns (2020), a set of sculptures resembling long arms with upstretched hands that are made of earth and rise up out of the banks of the James River in Virginia.

As a form of care, Williams finds refuge in touching, digging, and creating with soil; for the artist, who lives in Brooklyn and was based in Richmond for a year as part of a fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University, soil is a salve. "Soil," as Williams notes of the earth that makes up the riverbanks, "is silent witness to the historical and ongoing dispossession of Black people in America." Williams's artwork asks how the legacy of chattel slavery and racial apartheid continues to haunt the present, and how soil might be a site of recovery and transformation.

In summer 2019 as part of The Shed's group exhibition Open Call, Williams presented Meditation on the Making of America, a site-specific portrait of America and the exploitation of Black people and land, also made of soil. This work is currently in the permanent collection at the Hirshhorn Museum.