Monuments have become sites of contention in recent public discourse in the United States. Cases have been made for their removal and replacement, as well as for expanded education around the histories of genocide and colonialism; certain monuments memorialize and simplify.
But what about alternative approaches to memorializing history? Virginia-based artist Sandy Williams IV’s sculptures offer one possibility.
Williams’s ongoing project, “40 ACRES Archive,” now in its fourth year, includes multiple components, from archival and community-based research to public art events and sculptures to an online platform and short films documenting these elements.
“40 acres” refers to the promise of material reparations made by the U.S. government to formerly enslaved people during the Reconstruction Era, enabling the settlement of “freedmen communities” throughout the country. The effort was abandoned after President Lincoln’s assassination, and much of its history goes untaught. Exploring this legacy, Williams simultaneously reveals a gap in American history and attempts to fill it.
The latest installment in Williams’s project is “40 ACRES: Weeskville,” a multimedia exhibition at Telematic Media Arts in SoMa.
The show’s centerpiece is an 18-minute film documenting a 2023 Juneteenth celebration during which Williams commissioned a skywriter to trace the rough dimensions of Weeskville, a historic freedmen community, above Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where it once existed.
Shots of the skywriting are spliced together with footage of the celebration and interviews with community members. Williams also provides a voiceover, commenting on the intent and execution of the piece.
As an extension of Williams’ rigorous research and collaborative spirit of artmaking, the film is accompanied by a collage of archival photographs and a poster visitors are invited to take with them. One side of the poster features an illustration by painter Jake Troyli, offering visual references for the size of 40 acres, from seven New York City blocks to 48,400 cubicles. The overleaf features an in-depth text by Williams and University of Richmond student researcher Ryan Doherty.
“The phrase 40 acres and a mule,” Williams tells us, “lives within diasporic memory as the remembered failure of the United States to make amends for the brutal conditions that Black Americans endure.”
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Sandy William IV, “40 ACRES: Weeksville,” film still. Courtesy the artist and Telematic Media Arts.
Courtesy the artist and Telematic Media Arts
The skywriting offers a stark material analogy for the conceptual issues at stake. If a key feature of a monument is that it disappears, it follows that it would be memorializing the ephemerality of community, fleeting hopes and disappointed dreams.
Freedmen communities didn’t last long, and the repercussions of the ensuing displacement of Black Americans persist today in issues of mass incarceration, homelessness and failing welfare programs.
The other result of the film’s heady academic aesthetics is a rousing optimism. Much like the skywriting Williams uses to memorialize them, freedmen communities flourished for when they did exist, morphing and persisting in present-day communities, a diaspora unified by its fluidity. In this way, “40 ACRES: Weeksville” could be seen as a statement as much about longevity as brevity, evidenced in the stewardship of local history and scenes of Black joy exhibited throughout the film.
Near the film’s end, Williams peels the curtain back, telling us that “this work is not about art ... this work is about love ... about holding important memories outside of systems that would forget them and projecting the hope of our struggles across generations.”
Implicit in Williams’s greater project is the fact that the archival and educational systems in the United States have failed to preserve and teach its past accurately.
“40 ACRES Archive” not only amends that absence but also expands the definition of historical records to include art as a mode of documentation at once factually accurate and emotionally resonant.
