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Center for Art, Invention & Uncommon Practice Announces 2026 Artist-In-Residence, Kiyan Williams
- Boston Ujima Project
- 13 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Boston, MA — The Boston Ujima Project, Inc. is proud to announce its new Center for Art, Invention & Uncommon Practice (CAIUP).
The Center will launch in 2026 with support for acclaimed interdisciplinary artist Kiyan Williams, as the Center’s inaugural artist-in-residence. Williams is known for their commanding sculptures and installations that excavate Black histories, queer futures, and the politics of land and belonging. During their residency, Williams will collaborate with the Center on a suite of programs that invite Boston communities into the ideas and questions animating their forthcoming public art project.
Throughout 2026, the Center will present conversations, workshops, and community gatherings designed to deepen engagement with Williams’s practice, including an artist talk, braiding workshops and more. The residency will begin in January 2026, with public programming announced throughout the year.
Kiyan Williams is an artist based in New York City. Working fluidly across sculpture, installation, performance, and public art, their practice traces legacies of dispossession and diasporic subjectivity embedded in the landscape, architecture, and iconography of the American project, and more broadly the Atlantic world. In their elemental works the earth and weather are both protagonists and collaborators.
Williams’ work has been exhibited across the country and internationally at: The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), The Hirshhorn (Washington D.C.), ICA Boston (Boston), The Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield), MIT Vera List Center (Cambridge), Paula Cooper Gallery (New York), Peres Projects (Milan), Altman Siegel (San Francisco), Lyles and King (New York), SculptureCenter (New York), Brooklyn Museum (New York), Socrates Sculpture Park (New York), Art Omi (Ghent), and The Shed (New York). Their debut institutional solo exhibition, Between Starshine and Clay, was presented at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) in 2022. In 2022 they presented their first public art work in New York City commissioned by Public Art Fund in the group exhibition Black Atlantic. Williams was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Even Better Than the Real Thing.
Their work has been featured and reviewed in numerous publications including Text Zer Kunst, Artforum, The New York Times: T Magazine, ArtNews, Frieze, BOMB Magazine, émergent magazine, and Mousse Magazine. They were recently profiled by The New York Times and Cultured Magazine. Williams is the recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship, Graham Foundation Grant, Franklin Furnace Fund, and Fountainhead Fellowship in Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. They earned a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from Columbia University.
The Center for Art, Invention & Uncommon Practice (CAIUP) is a commercial gallery and cultural initiative of the Boston Ujima Project, Inc. dedicated to supporting artists, thinkers, and practitioners whose work expands the possibilities for collective life and liberatory futures.
The Boston Ujima Project, Inc. is a Black-led democratic organization building cooperative economic infrastructure in Boston, with a mission to return wealth to working-class communities of color. Ujima is bringing together neighbors, workers, business owners, investors, grassroots organizers, and culture-makers, to create a community-controlled economy in our city.
