ABOUT

“An oral ruttier is a long poem containing navigational instructions that sailors learned by heart and recited from memory. The poem contained the routes and tides, the stars and maybe the taste and flavor of the waters, the coolness, the saltiness; all for finding one’s way at sea.” –Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

Stone Maps (Ruttier for the Dispossessed)—the first site-responsive installation of Entanglements, a series of sculptural and architectural interventions by the artist Kiyan Williams—is an earthwork that traces the histories embedded in the landscape and built environment of Boston. The installation features braided, monolithic stones situated on Copp’s Hill Terrace, a historic park in the city’s North End. Overlooking Boston Harbor, the installation lies at the heart of the former New Guinea settlement, one of the first Black communities in Boston (and colonial America); and is adjacent to Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, where over 1000 Black Bostonians are buried in unmarked graves. Among the unmarked graves are believed to be Phillis Wheatley Peters, the first Black woman to publish a book of poetry, and her child.

As a point of departure Williams retraced the transatlantic voyage of the ship the Phillis that trafficked Wheatley Peters from her birthplace of Senegambia to Boston in 1761. The artist gathered volcanic basalt stones from along the coast of Dakar, including Gorée Island, a colonial-era slave trading post; and Pointe des Almadies, the westernmost point of the continent of Africa. Williams, who often gathers materials from along the shoreline, figures the edge where land meets water as an interstitial site of departure, emergence, and transformation where matter and meaning are refashioned and reconstituted through forces at once violent and transcendent. Each stone has been shaped and carved by volcanic eruption, the Atlantic ocean, wind, weathering, and erosion. The stones are a sedimentation of time, memory, atmospheric conditions, and the geological memory that constitutes the flesh of the earth. Shipped via commercial freight from Senegal to the U.S. along the same routes of the transatlantic slave trade, the stones are further (re)contextualized by the infrastructure of global logistics and economic trade systems that persist from the colonial era to the present day.

Once at their studio Williams continued to transform the stones through intimate and labor-intensive sculptural processes, embedding hair into the surface of each stone and hand-braiding them using a method called freestyling, which they liken to improvisational mark-making and drawing traditions. The stones are finished with hair gel and shea butter, a skin moisturizer also imported from Senegal, further evoking the body and foregrounding the connection between the terrestrial and corporeal. The braided motifs embedded in the “skin” of the stones are inspired by the wind and ocean currents that connect the shorelines of Boston, Dakar, and London, forming a spiral that evokes movement and motion across continents and oceanscapes.

At Copp’s Hill Terrace the stones are arranged in both a circle and a quincunx, or an “x”, symbolizing the crossroads between the earth and the cosmos, a convergence across time and geographies, and energy radiating in all directions. Inspired by the composition of Wheatley Peter’s seminal poem “On Being Brought From Africa To America,” which consists of eight lines of verse, the installation features an outer ring made with eight stones, four of which correspond with the cardinal directions, anchored by a 500 pound basalt boulder in the center. The base of the sculpture is composed of a bed of crushed, locally sourced Dedham Granite, a grayish-pink rock that forms part of Boston’s bedrock and that was used extensively in 19th century construction. It is also the same stone type that comprises Plymouth Rock. As such, the geological histories of the installation recalls another transatlantic voyage seminal to the nation’s origin, the journey of the Mayflower.

For Williams, Wheatley Peter’s only known published collection served as both a source of inspiration, an interlocutor, and intersubjective collaborator from which the arrangement and composition of the installation derives. The juxtaposition of volcanic basalt from Dakar and Dedham Granite from Boston is informed by Phillis Wheatley Peters’ grammatical style. Literary scholars have noted how Wheatley Peters employed appositional arrangement, the placement of two elements side by side such that one element renames and transforms the meaning of the other, as a means to subvert the neoclassical literary tradition. Following Wheatley Peters’ anagrammatical interventions, Williams embedded volcanic basalt from the shores of Dakar within a bed of crushed Dedham Granite, a stone that constitutes the geological foundation of Boston, such that one defines and is defined in relation to the other, collapsing the geographic and metaphoric distance between two interconnected sites. Bridging Christina Sharpe’s theory of anagrammatical Blackness, wherein Blackness rearranges and disorders dominant structures, and Robert Smithson’s Nonsite, Williams’ intervention functions as an anagrammatical installation, or a Black nonsite, that annotates and redacts landscapes marked by legacies of enslavement and historical violence.

Collectively, the installation forms a cosmogram that aligns with the Sun, Polaris, and other celestial bodies during the summer and winter solstices to trace the nautical routes between the United States, Senegal, and England, mapping the oceanic networks that shaped the life of Wheatley Peters, the landscape of Boston, and more broadly the Atlantic world. Drawing its title from Dionne Brand’s seminal text A Map to the Door of No Return, the installation is a sculptural ruttier, a compass to navigate past and present conditions of uprootedness, and a wayfinder for the infinite possibilities for living and being in diaspora.

Entanglements is a multi-part commission by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture’s Un-Monument initiative, and supported by grants from VIA Art Fund and the Mellon Foundation.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Working fluidly across sculpture, installation, performance, and interventions in public space, the artist Kiyan Williams has built a practice that traces legacies of dispossession embedded in the landscape and built environment. With a sensitivity to the relationship between material and place, and informed by architecture, archaeology, and ecology, Williams’s practice attunes us to the histories that hum beneath the surface of the soil. In their elemental works the earth and weather are protagonists and collaborators.

(RUTTIER FOR THE DISPOSSESSED)

HOME

ABOUT

PROGRAMS

NOTES