MINNEAPOLIS, MN.- For more than a decade, multidisciplinary artist Kandis Williams (US, b. 1985) has engaged with the politics of representation, labor, and the body through an impressive array of media, from collage and sculpture to film and performance, and to writing and publishing. On April 24, 2025, the Walker Art Center opened the artist’s first institutional survey, inviting audiences to connect with her incisive and timely practice. Titled A Surface, the expansive presentation features both major bodies of work and lesser-known objects that are being shown in a museum context for the first time. Together, the depth of works captures the incredible range and intricacy of Williams’s practice and invites engagement with themes and ideas that are especially resonant in our contemporary moment. A Surface will remain on view at the Walker through August 24, 2025.
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The exhibition is curated by Taylor Jasper, the Walker’s Susan and Rob White Assistant Curator of Visual Arts, with support from Laurel Rand-Lewis, the Walker’s Curatorial Fellow in Visual Arts. A Surface is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication produced by the Walker’s design studio in close collaboration with the artist. Offering the most comprehensive written overview of Williams’s work to-date, the publication will include essays by Jasper as well as Denise Ryner, the Andrea B. Laporte Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia.
Throughout her work, Williams positions the experience of the body within histories and expressions of racism, nationalism, eroticism, and authority. In particular, she illuminates and challenges the ways that Black bodies have been displaced, disciplined, dispossessed, and commodified, while creating space for reclamation, agency, and autonomy. Within her practice, collage serves as a critical connective thread, allowing her to layer, fragment, and disrupt newly made and archival imagery across the many media with which she works. In this way, she is both physically and conceptually unraveling systems of oppression and establishing new structures and vocabularies, leveraging the power of visual culture to dismantle longstanding hierarchies to reveal new opportunities for the making of personal and communal identity.
Williams’s distinct engagement with material surface as a site of action and transformation serves as the foundational anchor of the exhibition and gives the presentation its name. Across sculpture, video, installation, and works on paper, A Surface unfolds as an interrogation of visibility, power, and the conditions that shape and discipline Black bodies. Each gallery builds on Williams’s exploration of surveillance, movement, labor, and mythology, revealing how systems of oppression are inscribed on the body and how those same bodies resist, subvert, and reimagine the terms of their existence.
The first gallery, titled Politics of the Gaze, examines the ways Black bodies have been made hypervisible and are judged under the patriarchal and racialized gaze. Here, Williams’s two-channel video Eurydice (2017–2021) transforms the classical myth into a meditation on spectatorship and surveillance. Within the work, Orpheus’s fateful backward glance is reframed as an act of scrutiny and possession, implicating the audience in the very power dynamics Williams critiques. Collages and works on paper in this section further explore how race, gender, and beauty ideals have been visually codified. Together, these works challenge the idea of looking as a passive act, instead asserting that looking can carry the potential for both violence and agency.
In the second gallery, titled Mapping Power Through Movement, Williams considers how bodies are organized and controlled through choreography, spatial restriction, and social expectation. In particular, she draws on the histories of Black performance, from vernacular dance to spectacle, to expose how bodily expression is shaped by both individual agency and forces beyond a person’s control. At the heart of this gallery is the video Triadic Ballet (2021), which captures a dancer moving within a rigid geometric grid. Their movements are directed by imposed spatial boundaries that evoke both the disciplinary nature of classical ballet and the broader regulation of Black bodies. The room’s accompanying works push this core exploration further.
In Plots of Resistance, Williams shifts her focus to the historical and contemporary exploitation of Black labor, tracing its enduring links to land, agriculture, and extraction. The plantation, prison farm, and factory emerge as interconnected sites where Black bodies have been forced into economic production. The video Annexation Tango (2020) anchors this section. In the work, Williams layers together footage of a dancer performing atop the agricultural fields of Virginia’s prison farms and historical imagery of enslaved laborers. The dancer’s movements blend tango, voguing, and contemporary dance, making visible the ways in which Black cultural expression carries the weight of oppression and the opportunity of artistic freedom.
The final gallery, titled Myth, Media, and the Monstrous Other, unpacks how Blackness has been framed as a site of both fascination and fear. Williams dissects the ways dominant narratives construct Blackness as something to be controlled, punished, or eliminated—often through the language of mythology and horror. The works in this section draw on archival sources, pop culture, and historical imagery to interrogate how Black people have been rendered monstrous within the white supremacist imaginary. The video Medusa (2023) reimagines the Gorgon myth through a contemporary media lens, examining how Black femininity is framed as both threat and spectacle. The room’s other works explore how horror tropes have been used to justify racialized violence while also gesturing toward the ways Black artists and storytellers reclaim these images.
Across these interconnected rooms, A Surface unfolds as an incisive examination of how visual culture constructs Blackness. At the heart of Williams’s practice is the notion that surfaces—whether paper, screen, stage, or skin—are not merely passive planes for representation, but active sites of power, control, and resistance. Through acts of cutting, layering, and recombination, Williams offers a deeply researched and visually urgent meditation on the history and opportunities held by Black bodies.
“Kandis Williams’s work feels especially urgent in this moment, as questions of visibility, power, and control over the body continue to shape our social and political landscapes. Through A Surface, we see how her practice not only critiques these structures but actively works to unravel and reconfigure them. Her approach—melding historical research with contemporary media, movement, and collage—makes clear that these forces are not abstract; they are lived, embodied, and deeply felt,” said Jasper. “At a time when the policing of bodies, narratives, and histories is intensifying, Williams’s work offers a critical space for reflection, resistance, and reimagination. This exhibition is an opportunity to engage with an artist whose practice challenges us to see with more complexity and to recognize the stakes of what remains visible, what is erased, and what can be made anew.”
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