Kandis Williams: A Surface

On April 24, 2025, the Walker Art Center will open Kandis Williams: A Surface. This is the artist’s first institutional survey and invites audiences to connect with her incisive and timely practice. The expansive presentation will feature both major bodies of work and lesser-known objects that will be 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. The exhibition is curated by Taylor Jasper, the Walker’s Susan and Rob White Assistant Curator of Visual Arts. It is accompanied by a publication produced by the Walker’s award-winning design studio in close collaboration with the artist. Offering the most comprehensive written overview of Williams’s work to date, the publication includes essays by Jasper as well as Denise Ryner, the Andrea B. Laporte Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia. 

For more than a decade, Williams has engaged with the politics of representation, labor, and the body through an impressive array of media, from collage, sculpture, film, and performance to writing and publishing. At the heart of Williams’s practice is the notion that the surface—whether paper, screen, stage, or skin—is not merely a passive plane for representation but a charged site of resistance and critique. 

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. In particular, WIlliams illuminates and challenges the ways that Black bodies have been displaced, disciplined, dispossessed, and commodified, while creating space for reclamation, agency, and autonomy. 

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 provides an incisive examination of how visual culture constructs Blackness.  

“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,” says Jasper “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.” 

The exhibition is split into four sections, which 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. 

Curatorial team: Taylor Jasper, Susan and Rob White Assistant Curator of Visual Arts, Visual Arts; with Laurel Rand-Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts 

Exhibition sponsors: Kandis Williams: A Surface is organized by the Walker Art Center, with support from the Edward R. Bazinet Charitable Foundation and the Pohlad Family. Additional support is provided by Candy and Michael Barasch, Cinda Collins, and Keith Rivers. The exhibition catalogue is supported by Rosina Lee Yue and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of Walker Art Center publications.