Location: Parren J. Mitchell Art-Sociology Building, The Clarvit Courtyard
The Department of Art presents an outdoor screening of two works by Sandy Williams IV: 40°N, 73°W" and "29° S, 71°W. These free screenings are currently showing each evening from sunset to midnight through March 21, 2025 in The Clarvit Courtard in the Parren J. Mitchell Art-Sociology Building.
40°N, 73°W lives on an expanding intersection between archiving, art, education, historical research, community organizing, public space interventions, map making and contemporary gestures of repair. This multidisciplinary project centers the history of Weeksville, one of the first recognized free Black communities in the US, and examines the US Reconstruction Era as it relates to today’s inequities and global communities.
29° S, 71°W documents the filmmaker's 2018 journey to Totoralillo Norte, Chile to witness a solar eclipse. Similar to the ways a solar eclipse highlights the connections that exist between the sun, the moon, the earth and human perception, this film considers the history of this typically tranquil coast that became the site of pilgrimage for thousands of tourists from all over the world who gathered to witness a twenty-minute astrological event.
About the Artist:
Sandy Williams IV is an artist and educator whose work generates moments of communal catharsis. Williams’ conceptual practice uses time itself as a material and aims to unfold legacies and dynamics hidden within popular historical narratives, the landscape of shared public spaces and amongst our collective memories. Through ephemeral, malleable and collaborative public memorials, Williams’ work unsettles colonial logics of permanence, uniformity and displacement. This work creates participatory paths for communal engagement informed by targeted research and site-specificity: holding space for disenfranchised public memories and visualizing frameworks of emancipation and shared agency.