To Sandy Williams, sculpture can take many forms.

“The way I refer to sculpture is pretty multidisciplinary,” said Williams, an assistant professor of art. “It's about an attention to materials and form. But I think you find that in most art forms in different ways, which is why I think I move so much in between.”

Williams’ latest sculpture took place in the clouds: a skywriting project.

“The skywriting started as just a score on paper,” Williams said. “I was thinking a lot about the idea of reparations, the history of it, and thinking, ‘What would that look like in the contemporary? What does that memory and legacy feel like?’”

Williams chose to have a skywriter trace the dimensions of a 40-acre plot in the sky above Chimborazo Park in Richmond, stemming from the reparations model of 40 acres and a mule given to freed Black men in the United States in the 1860s. But few Black men actually received the land they were promised.

“I was interested in what it meant to trace that in the sky, to visualize what 40 acres looks like,” Williams said. “But then, too, the sky is this space of projection for us. It's this space where we project dreams, and our imaginations, and our thoughts of the future and the afterlife. These 40 acres are a space of visualizing this alternate reality that never really happened.”

Williams encourages students to think of alternative spaces as their canvas. The professor has exhibited and performed their interdisciplinary art practice nationally and internationally. One notable series recreates popular public monuments as wax sculptures, which audiences are then invited to hold, melt, carve, and share agency over. The Wax Monument Series currently includes various U.S. monuments, crosses, and an American flag.

“In addition to making ephemeral artworks in these communal spaces of gathering and understanding and learning together, we are also working on more concrete markers that will hold space and remember marginalized histories,” Williams said. “As part of my job as an educator, I feel invested in telling these stories. My work as an artist, as an educator, and as just a community participant, it's all aligning.”