Standing along the shore of the East River in Brooklyn Bridge Park, the location of a former shipping port, is a site-responsive group exhibition by artists Leilah Babirye, Hugh Hayden, Dozie Kanu, Tau Lewis, and Kiyan Williams, titled “Black Atlantic.” The exhibition is inspired by “the diaspora across the ocean that connects Africa with the Americas and Europe.” Over time, these transatlantic networks have led to blends, hybrids, and clashes of cultures and identities, and each commission suggests a unique and creative approach in the pursuit of crafting seen, valued, and sustainable Black identities and futures.
Kiyan Williams, artist behind one work titled Ruins of Empire, reimagines an iconic symbol of American values, The Statue of Freedom. The 1863 monument, designed by Thomas Crawford and still standing atop the U.S. Capitol Building, was built entirely using the labor of enslaved people. Williams’ iteration of the work appears in a state of decomposition, “embodying how American ideals of freedom are tied to subjugation, drawing inspiration from sci-fi tropes of a destroyed monument like the Statue of Liberty as a symbol for a world ruined by environmental devastation.” Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, these pieces, wide-ranging both materially and conceptually, aim to create an open exchange of ideas between artists of the same generation that propose an “open, multifaceted, and heterogeneous idea of identity in the United States today.”
