Artist and educator to deliver Emancipation Week keynote

Roanoke College is pleased to welcome artist and educator Sandy Williams IV for the 2024 Emancipation Week keynote lecture, “Freedom and The 40 ACRES Archive.”

The talk, which will take place at 6 p.m. on April 17 in Wortmann Ballroom, is free and open to the public. Those who wish to attend must register here.

Williams, an assistant professor of art who specializes in sculpture at the University of Richmond, produces interdisciplinary work that aims to create moments of communal catharsis. Sometimes ephemeral and often malleable, their work challenges traditional colonial ideas of permanence, uniformity and displacement by creating opportunities for community engagement. Their projects expand beyond the gallery and into public spaces, including schools, parks – and even the sky.

In New York City in 2023, Williams collaborated with a skywriting pilot to trace the dimensions of a 500-acre plot of land meant to represent the Weeksville community, a Black-owned neighborhood created in New York before the Civil War. Another piece, “Free Wax I,” was a sculptural representation of the U.S. flag that visitors to Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens were invited to mark, melt or mold.

Visitors to Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, NY, interact with Sandy Williams IV's sculpture "Free Wax 1."

The Emancipation Day lecture will not be Williams’ first interaction with the Roanoke College community – or the last. In 2023, Williams was selected to design and create a major permanent work on campus that will memorialize the enslaved laborers who worked at the college before the Civil War. Williams’ ambitious concept for the piece will soon be reviewed by the Roanoke College Board of Trustees. Once approved, a rendering will be revealed to the public. 

“I want to bring humanity to those people who have not been included in the record, but who were so vital to the growth of the college,” Williams said.

Williams’ Emancipation Day lecture is sponsored by the Center for Studying Structures of Race (CSSR), which was established at Roanoke in 2019 to support research that helps the college community better understand the role of enslaved people in the institution’s history. One important CSSR project is the Genealogy of Slavery project, a student-faculty research initiative that aims to develop a database of information about enslaved people in the Roanoke Valley before and during the Civil War. So far, the project has identified the names of approximately 2,500 individuals who were enslaved in Roanoke County, and that work inspired Williams’ concept for the memorial.

As part of the preparation for the memorial, the CSSR has hosted lectures and conversations about monuments, and the college has welcomed artists and scholars, including Charles Gaines, Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Nicholas Galanin and Mabel O. Wilson, who co-designed the memorial to enslaved laborers at the University of Virginia.

Roanoke’s Community Vision Committee, a group of community members, faculty, staff and students, reviewed proposals before selecting Williams. Williams hopes the Roanoke College memorial will be a permanent space that welcomes everyone in the community.

“Look at the Lincoln Memorial,” Williams said. “It is permanent, but the space is important for social engagement. It is a gathering place that allows you to think about your place in context with the longer history.”

Emancipation Day, observed in Virginia on April 3 of each year, commemorates the first weeks of April 1865, when most enslaved people gained freedom. The celebration at Roanoke College is an annual event which aims to spotlight local and regional history. It also connects to the college’s celebration of Juneteenth at a time when students and faculty are on campus.