The White House Has That Sinking Feeling (Thanks to an Artist)
“This is my big girl.” The artist Kiyan Williams was referring to federal architecture — specifically the northern facade of the White House, which reappears, redesigned in dirt and tilted 15 degrees off its axis, on a roof terrace at this year’s Whitney Biennial.
Commanding the view from the High Line and down Gansevoort Street, it’s a contemporary ruin: an outpouring of grief, a waning symbol of American power in the months before another contentious presidential election.
A self-proclaimed alchemist, Williams specializes in transforming wet soil into hardened sculptures that typically live outdoors, where the wind carries seedlings that may attach to the artist’s creations and bloom.
Often, Williams collects the earth from historically important sites of loss in the African diaspora: plantations of the American South, street corners where Black trans women were murdered or the banks of a river that became a thoroughfare for the domestic slave trade.
