Up Close: “Notes on Digging” by Kiyan Wiliams

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. Kiyan Williams’s video “Notes on Digging” explores how connecting with the earth helps the artist recover from 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 from, 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 recently based in Richmond while on a yearlong fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University, soil is a salve. The James River is known as the “founding river” in the US. It stretches from the Appalachian Mountains to the Chesapeake Bay and was the location of both the first English colonial settlement in 1607 and the arrival and forced transition of the first kidnapped and trafficked West Africans in the system of chattel slavery in Virginia. “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 Open Call’s group exhibition at The Shed, 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. “Up Close” is a digital series that invites artists and creative thinkers to contribute new artworks and discussions exploring what it means to think about the world and make art right now.