Kandis Williams

Kandis Williams is an artist, writer, editor, and publisher stationed both in Berlin and Los Angeles.

Biography

Youth and Education Williams was born in 1985 in Baltimore, Maryland. She found her time there to be a struggle as professors were not as receptive to a black student making art of black people.

After college, Williams completed a couple residences. Her first was in 2016 at the Ace Hotel's art residency, where artist are invited to turn one of the hotel rooms into their studio for a month. This is where Williams created reader, Culture of Fuccboi. During this same year, she would also complete a residency at Cassandra Classrooms. Her time there opened her eyes to different art practices and visual language of violence through the lens of her students. This was her debut show in New York at the David Zwirner gallery in Tribeca.

A Line features large-scale collages of archival photographs of dancers and choreographers featuring icons, such as Alvin Ailey, George Balanchine, and Martha Graham, in addition to Williams own photographs. Some of these collages are annotated with William's thoughts about performance and politics. In addition, there was a video installation presented on old school monitors, and it shows a dancer working through a dance William's choreographed. There is an archival video that flickers on a background screen within each screen. Large artificial plants are scattered across the gallery, and some leaves are covered in flesh tones to return attention to the body. This was her first solo show, and it ran from November 6, 2020 - September 12, 2021.

A Field is a green house filled with plant sculptures made of collages pasted on wire forms. The collages featured on the plant leaves and backdrops are of action shots of laboring bodies. She uses photos from archival documentation of Mississippi chain gangs, images from Vintage Magazines, and depictions of Uruguayan tango dancers. The work as a whole comments on the relation between labor, performance, and sexualization. The Rivers of Styxx, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada (2018) Works on Paper, Vienna (2017) Inner States, St. Charles Projects, Baltimore, Maryland 2016) Red Square, OTTOZOO Project, Milan, Italy (2012) A Woman's Work, a PopRally event at MoMA organized by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah - (2018) Human Resources Los Angeles - (2016)

Notable Group Exhibitions Strong, Bright, Useful & True: Recent Acquisitions and Contemporary Art From Baltimore, Irene and Richard Frary Gallery, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, DC (2025) Death of A, The Whitney Biennial 2022, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles (2022) They also offer artist zines at an affordable price on their website. The mission statement of the organization is to spread ideas and language, propagate dialogue centering ethics, femme-driven activism, and black scholarship.