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Meet Artist Kandis Williams, Whose Poetic Work Has a Sharp, Cerebral, and Radically Political Edge


Kandis Williams. Photo: Dicko Chan, 2018.
At the center of Kandis Williams’s first solo institutional show, “A Field,” on view at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art through August 1, a full-sized greenhouse is shrouded in sculptures of exotic plants. Inside, the artist’s 2020 video,
Annexation Tango, depicts a dancer’s body floating over aerial shots of Virginia farms and California forest fires. Superimposing a dance born in the spiritual traditions of enslaved Africans over two sites that have been respectively tilled and extinguished by incarcerated people, the seemingly disparate footage illustrates a recurring theme in Williams’s recent bodies of work: the enduring link between the cultivation of plant life in the New World and forced labor. ....

United States , Virginia Commonwealth University , Joshua White , Virgil Abloh , Dicko Chan , George Floyd , Los Angeles , Romare Bearden , David Hale , Paul Salveson , Amber Esseiva , Kandis Williams , David Zwirner , Ebony Haynes , Luma Westbau , Henry Huntington , James Baldwin , Louis Vuitton , Breonna Taylor , Virginia Commonwealth University Institute Of Contemporary Art , Cooper Union , Contemporary Art , Annexation Tango , New World , Google Meet , Hammer Biennial ,