Event open to Stanford affiliates only

Kiyan Williams’ Reaching Towards Warmer Suns, is a public work on view on the grounds of the Anderson Collection, among a grove of oak trees. The piece was originally installed along the banks of the Powhatan River (James River) in Richmond, Virginia, where some of the first enslaved Black people touched land in the new/ruined world. The work is made of soil from the river and emerged from artist and Stanford alum Kiyan Williams’ time along the slave docks of Virginia within the context of the pandemic and protests against on-going anti-Black police violence. Williams explains how the sculpture arose from a need to mark the paths of slavery as sacred, and “memorialize on-going struggles of self-determination for Black people.”

Click below to watch this recorded conversation between artist Kiyan Williams and A-lan Holt, director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford as they speak about his life and work as well as the role of artists as makers, thinkers, and scholars live at the Anderson Collection.