Kiyan Williams’ Hammer Project and first solo museum show, Between Starshine & Clay, opens TOMORROW at @hammer_museum ✨✨✨ a love supreme to @kiyanwilliams whose brilliance and friendship has brought me closer to the land, the earth, and the toil of soil 🌱 Rooted in a practice of collecting earth from sites and spaces that hold significant familial and Black American histories, the artist Kiyan Williams produces sculptures, installations, and performances that seek to redefine fixed notions of identity, the body, and American history. Often creating amorphous life-size figures that both reveal and distort traces of the body, Williams meditates on the fluidity of the “ruined” or “soiled” form, suggesting the potential to transcend, reshape, and become anew. Combining organic and human-made materials such as dirt, sandstone, and Kanekalon synthetic hair, along with natural elements such as light, the artist considers the formal elements that bind the residue of Blackness—from the origins of the agrarian South to the innovative everyday hairstyles of Black femmes. Musing on the literary and poetic genius of an intergenerational group of Black women whose writings have inspired and affirmed Williams’s own practice, the installation Between Starshine & Clay (2022) takes its title from a line from the poem “won’t you celebrate with me” (1993) by Lucille Clifton. Featuring three large-scale sculptures that transform the Vault Gallery into a cosmic terrain ripe with hued lights, sentient beings, and metallic flooring, Williams’s work manifests a reparative space where future bodies lead with liberation. -zulie🧡xoxo