In the Studio: Sandy Williams IV

Sandy Williams IV is an artist based in Richmond, VA, and a 2024 Joan Mitchell Fellow. We interviewed them about their work and creative practice in March 2025.

I am an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and professor. My conceptual art practice studies the vernacular of time as it exists across cultural structures, personal experiences, and as a unit of measurement. My public art practice considers the contextual landscape of communal histories, socio-carceral constructs, and interpersonal relationships.

I make artworks for galleries and for public environments. My ephemeral and permanent memorials hold space for disenfranchised memories, create participatory experiences, and visualize new frameworks for communal emancipation.

My art practice is ultimately concerned with cultivating love and empathy. I make art because I care. My mom is an amazing cook, and when I think about all the meals that she made for our family over the years, I most remember how loved they made me feel. In so many ways, I learned how to care for others through my parents and grandparents, but especially through my mother, and I want my art to hold people and their stories with that same love and care.

My work follows in the tradition of freedom fighters and emancipation workers. I ground myself in the stories of Black and indigenous people fighting against the most extreme odds to survive and persist. I see myself as their ally and ancestor continuing the work towards our shared dream of equality and freedom.

I have a studio at the University of Richmond where I am a professor and the director of the Sculpture area in the Department of Art and Art History. My studio is not huge, but it is connected to a woodshop, metalshop, and a technology lab, which allows me to experiment and prototype with different mediums. I am on sabbatical this year, however, so my studio is currently located between my sketchbook and my laptop.

In the studio, my process starts with an idea. With public projects, I begin with a context. I typically work between my imagination and the limitations of my material reality to build projects and decide the best means or methods to communicate an idea.

As an example, when I was in grad school, I wrote a sort of poem about hiring a skywriter to trace the dimensions of a forty-acre plot in the sky, as a reference to the famous “40-acres and a mule” that was paid as reparations to newly freed people after emancipation. At the time, I was interested in this artwork as an idea (poem) that the reader could visualize and feel via their mind’s eye.

I was later asked to create a performance at Chimborazo Park in Richmond, VA. I discovered through research that before it was a park, in the year following the Civil War, the space was used as a Freedmen’s community for newly emancipated families. I was surprised to learn about this history, because unlike the many historical markers to white histories that were kept in and around the park, there was no record of this former Black community that in 1866 was quickly destroyed and dismantled.

I decided to manifest the 40-acre skywriting above the park, to highlight this little known history, and connect it to the larger diasporic arc of displaced Black communities along the East Coast, across the US, and through history. In addition to the skywriting performance we also gave speeches, made pamphlets, created an exhibition of our documentation, and had an official historical marker placed in the park to remember this community and its people.

In my recent work, I have been thinking a lot about how to memorialize lost histories, and the stories of people that we may never have access to. I am concerned with our public memory, and the ways we record and preserve our communal histories.

My ‘Time Ruler’ series comes out of this desire to hold space, memorialize, and visualize histories and events. This series presents objects that measure the duration of a single second at a speed of one mile per hour (i.e. when moving at one mile per hour, a distance of 17.6 inches can be traversed in one second. At 17.6 inches, each ruler is therefore 1 second long).

00:10 (To Remember the Murder of Eric Garner) is composed of ten bronze Time Rulers commemorating Eric Garner. On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner was murdered by an NYPD officer after the latter held him in a prohibited chokehold for 10 seconds. He was pronounced dead an hour later, and no officers were ever charged with his murder. This installation of ten bronze Time Rulers holds the weight and time of this tragedy as a memorial in our collective conscience.

Most recently I installed my first permanent site-specific memorial, Authors and Architects, at Roanoke College in Salem, VA. This memorial honors the legacies of the men, women, and children who were enslaved by Roanoke College founders between 1842 and 1865. It consists of about 1,000 bronze books, arranged in rows, and each book holds the name or identification of a person who was enslaved with specific ties to Roanoke College.

The title Authors and Architects recognizes the historical role of enslaved people as creators and founders in the history of the college. Their roles and identities extend beyond the conditions of subjugation typically used to bind and minimize the legacies of Black and Brown people in the telling of American history. This memorial honors their memory, acknowledges the freedom and education denied to them in their own time, and underscores the significant roles that Black people played in the establishment and success of the broader community.

I hope that my work can conjure moments of reflection for people. I would like to inspire a sense of catharsis that is communal and opens viewers up to perspectives they may not have otherwise considered. More than their aesthetic value, I see my artworks as conversation pieces, like portals or bridges to thoughts, feelings, or histoires that are absent, intangible, or might only exist invisibly within the space.

Interview and editing by Jenny Gill. Learn more about Sandy Williams IV’s work at sandywilliamsiv.com.