Ujima’s Center for Art, Invention & Uncommon Practice Announces 2026-27 Artist-In-Residence Kiyan Williams

The Boston Ujima Project’s Center for Art, Invention & Uncommon Practice is pleased to announce interdisciplinary artist Kiyan Williams as our 2026-27 Artist-in-Residence.

Williams is known for commanding sculptures and installations that engage Black histories, queer futures, and the politics of land, memory, and belonging. Working across sculpture, installation, performance, and public art, their practice considers how histories are embedded in, and contested through, the materials and landscapes that surround us.

During their residency, Williams will collaborate with the Center on a series of public programs that invite Boston communities into the ideas, questions, and methods animating their practice. Beginning with the September 2026 launch of Stone Maps (Ruttier for the Dispossessed), Williams’s new public installation, the residency will unfold through artist talks, workshops, and community gatherings that create opportunities for sustained engagement with their work.

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About Kiyan Williams

Kiyan Williams is an artist based in New York City. Working fluidly across sculpture, installation, performance, and interventions in public space, their practice traces legacies of dispossession and diasporic subjectivity embedded in the landscape, architecture, and iconography of the American project, and more broadly the transatlantic world. With a sensitivity to the relationship between material and place, and informed by architecture, archaeology, and ecology, Williams’ practice attunes us to the histories that hum beneath the surface of the soil. 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), and Paula Cooper Gallery (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 JustSmile Magazine, Text Zer Kunst, The New York Times: T Magazine, 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.