Memorial artist Sandy Williams IV opens exhibition at Roanoke

Roanoke College is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition that will showcase the works of Sandy Williams IV, the Richmond-based artist and educator who was selected to design a memorial to enslaved laborers on the Roanoke College campus. 

The exhibition, “Freedom is Not a Metaphor,” will open Friday, Sept. 13 in Smoyer Gallery inside Roanoke College’s Olin Hall Galleries. An opening reception with Williams will take place in the gallery from 6-8 p.m. The concept for Roanoke's memorial to enslaved laborers will also be unveiled to the public that day.  

“Freedom is Not a Metaphor” is a collection of works by Williams that span photography, sculpture, research and installations. The exhibition will invite viewers to reconsider the construction and contestation of memory through personal narratives and historical contexts.  

Williams intertwines family portraits with discussion on public spaces, challenging traditional narratives and sparking conversations about agency and historical injustices. This exhibition will serve as a platform for diverse voices to engage with the complexities of public memory, advocating for reconciliation and collective healing. 

Williams is an assistant professor of art at the University of Richmond whose work explores concepts of time, historical landscapes and national mythologies. Their work has been exhibited at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Richmond and New Art Dealers Alliance’s NADA House. It has also expanded beyond the gallery and into public spaces, including schools and parks – and even the sky.  

Williams is also the recipient of the Socrates Sculpture Park Fellowship and the 2024 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, which includes $60,000 in unrestricted grants over a five-year period. 

In 2023, Williams was selected to design and create a major permanent work on the Roanoke College campus that will memorialize the enslaved laborers who worked at the college before the Civil War. The project was initiated by the school’s Center for Studying Structures of Race (CSSR), which has been working since 2019 to commemorate the role of enslaved people both in the history of the college and across the wider region. The memorial will showcase the names of more than 800 laborers.  

Williams came to the committee’s attention through Creative Time, a New York-based nonprofit that supports ambitious, socially conscious public art projects across the world, and through the help of Joanne Leonhardt Cassulo ’78, a Roanoke College alumna and trustee who worked in the art world and is a passionate advocate for the CSSR. 

The CSSR also sponsors the Genealogy of Slavery project, which has engaged Roanoke College students in research to create a database of enslaved laborers who were connected to the college or who lived in Roanoke County. That work has allowed the public, including genealogists and historians, to access data that was previously buried in courthouse records. To date, the database contains information about more than 4,000 individuals.  

The CSSR has also hosted a community open house, undertaken a survey, and organized the Memorials, Monuments & Memory Lecture Series. In April 2024, the center sponsored an Emancipation Week lecture on campus with Williams, who discussed their work and the conversations it is intended to inspire. 

"One of the ways that I'm engaging in this idea of the project of emancipation is just telling the stories, making space for them, and making events where people can come and share in that moment," Williams said. 

Also on Sept. 13, Roanoke College will open two related exhibitions inside Olin Hall Galleries.  

“Forget Me Not” was curated by the Center for Studying Structures of Race to chronicle the center’s accomplishments since 2019. This set of work highlights questions about structural racism in local, national and global contexts.  

“Child Be Free” showcases the work of artist Johnny Floyd, who experiments with paper, sewing and digital manipulation to explore our relationship with time and how we define ourselves within its bounds. Floyd intertwines archival African-American vernacular photography from Roanoke College’s Maurice Berger Memorial Archive and Library with themes of ancestry and connection.  

The opening receptions for “Forget Me Not” and “Child Be Free” will take place in Olin Hall Galleries from 6-8 p.m. on Sept. 13, concurrent with the opening reception for “Freedom is Not a Metaphor.”