Artist's Talk: Kiyan Williams in conversation with Vanessa Agard-Jones

Visual Artist Kiyan Williams (SOA '19) will give an artist's talk on their work and process, and then be joined in a larger conversation about fugitive Diasporic / Black / queer / trans embodiment with Columbia Professor Vanessa Agard-Jones.

Co-Sponsors: Columbia University School of the Arts: Visual Arts Program, the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department, and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies

4:00PM - 5:30PM ET

Deutsches Haus

420 West 116th Street

New York, NY 10027

Seating is available on a first-come first-served basis, RSVPs do not guarantee admission.

All attendees must show either a CU/BC ID (affiliates) or vaccination record (non-affiliate) for entry to the event.

is a visual artist based in New York City. Working in a range of media, they use quotidian and abject materials to make artworks that reveal the fissures and dissonances within dominant narratives of history and American identity. Their solo exhibition, A Crack Beneath the Weight of It All, is currently on view at Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco, CA. Their debut institutional solo exhibition, Between Starshine and Clay, was presented at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) in 2022. In 2022 they graduated from Columbia's MFA Visual Art program.

is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. At its most expansive, Agard-Jones' work asks how coloniality is made material: in social forms, in human and nonhuman bodies, and in the landscapes in which we live. With a focus on Black life in the Atlantic world, she conducts historical and ethnographic research on racialization, environmental crisis and the politics of gender and sexuality.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Deutsches Haus, 420 W 116th St, New York, United States