TEXT:

Promising the Sky is an exhibition of new and recent works by Sandy Williams IV. This exhibition centers around a cinematic restaging of documentation from their recent skywriting performance 40 ACRES: Chimborazo Park. Promising the Sky looks at how collective memories, aspirations, and actions–shared from past generations and envisioned by those to come–can manifest a more equitable economic, social, and political landscape in the United States. This exhibition is a constellation of photographs, bronze sculptures, research, text-based works, documentation of previous performances, and discursive programs that follows 40 ACRES: Chimborazo Park and charts the development of Williams’ ongoing, multifaceted project The 40 Acres Archive.

On May 21, 2022 Williams worked with a skywriting crew to trace the dimensions of a 40 acre plot over what is now known as Chimborazo Park in Richmond, Va. The skywriting performance was a public acknowledgment that was briefly visible for miles and a physical metaphor for the ways in which the legend of reparations, “40 Acres and a Mule”, still holds an invisible presence in our atmosphere. Through Promising the Sky, the presentation of artworks, printed broadsides and other forms of research, interviews, and open questions visible throughout the exhibition, Williams is establishing a living archive–one that unfolds, uncovers, and recovers histories in the present moment. While this exhibition focuses on the work at Chimborazo Park and other significant sites in Richmond, it also ushers in the cultivation of an archive that is not beholden to a conventional format or site but extends from the following premise. The 40 Acres Archive focuses on the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, and the structural decisions made during this period. The project looks specifically at the history of Freedmen communities, where newly emancipated people congregated and began to build communities at the end of the Civil War. To rebuild in a way that supported equality, after centuries of slavery and displacement, the success of these new communities would have been vital. Therefore, understanding the instrumentalized destruction of these communities, the federal failures of Reconstruction, and the unfulfilled promises of reparations is essential if trying to understand many of today’s inequalities. The 40 Acres Archive is building language and imagery around these conversations to plot a more positive way forward.

As part of Promising the Sky Williams and 1708 will place a permanent land acknowledgment at Chimborazo Park through the historical highway marker program at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources (DHR) in 2023. The initial response from the DHR was on view along with the proposed text and the artist’s rendering of the historical marker. 1708 and curator Park C. Myers are committed to the establishment of this land acknowledgment beyond the duration of this exhibition.

Special thanks to Ryan Doherty.

This project is supported by Reynolds Gallery; Oakwood Arts, where Sandy was an artist in residence through support from CultureWorks; Afrikana Film Festival; Arts & Letters Creative Co; the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation; Trilobite Arts; and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

RELATED PRESS:

Richmond’s Last Confederate Statue Comes Down, Hyperallergic, 2022
How cleaning a statue became alums most provocative performance, VCUarts, 2019