from the earth we grow

Starting on October 12, the VAC is pleased to announce the opening of our new public sculpture initiative from the earth we grow. This project will present free outdoor art installations on the VAC grounds in the upcoming fall until 2022. Taking inspiration from untold, little-known, or oft-ignored BIPOC events, stories, and activists within Canadian history, three artists will create interactive, challenging, and historically critical public outdoor sculptures. Bowmanville-based Inuk artist Couzyn van Heuvelen, Montreal-based artist Anna Binta Diallo, and Richmond-Virginia-based artist Sandy Williams IV have been invited to present works in response to historically-ignored histories within Canada's many diverse communities. 

Intended to serve both local and greater communities, the project will see the VAC invite over 70 schools for pre-scheduled educational exhibition tours for visiting classes. The project will offer audiences and participating educational institutions personal tours that will expand on each work’s significance, background, and artistic intent. Selected writers including Kristy Triner, Josephine Dennis, and Yaniya Lee will present new critical responses to each work, available in October online. 

Virtual Tours of the exhibition will also be made available.

Artist Biographies

Anna Binta Diallo is a Canadian multi-disciplinary visual artist who investigates memory and nostalgia to create unexpected narratives surrounding identity. She was born in Dakar (Senegal, 1983) and raised in Saint-Boniface, Winnipeg on the traditional territory of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation. She completed her BFA at the University of Manitoba’s School of Fine Arts (2006) and received her MFA from the Transart Institue in Berlin (2013). Her work has been shown nationally including exhibitions in Brandon, Winnipeg, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Central and internationally in Finland, Taiwan, and Germany. Anna Binta Diallo has been the recipient of multiple grants and honours, notably from The Canada Council for the Arts, The Conseil des Arts et des lettres du Québec, and Francofonds. In 2019, Diallo's work was selected as a shortlisted finalist for the Salt Spring National Art Prize and in 2021 was awarded the Barbara Sphor Memorial Prize from the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre. She is currently based in Montreal, or Tio’tia:ke, on the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka.

Couzyn van Heuvelen
I am an Inuit artist living in Bowmanville, Ontario. I was born in Iqaluit, Nunavut, but have lived in Southern Ontario for much of my life. My work explores Inuit culture and identity, new and old technologies, and personal narratives. While rooted in the history and traditions of Inuit art, the work strays from established Inuit art making methods and explores a range of fabrication processes. My work concerns itself with making an Inuit presence visible in public spaces and the landscape of contemporary Canadian art.

​​Sandy Williams IV
I am an artist and educator based in Richmond, VA. My work is about the persistence of memory, the body, and resistance. My practice is in tasking audiences with agency, in order to generate both public and private opportunities for collaborative engagement. I’m in pursuit of the threads that connect our diasporic origin stories to the official record, to our colloquial histories, and to the current worlds we now find ourselves in. This work helps root identity in the place where it comes from – the love, the ancestors, the loss, the land, the lies, the ideas, the repression, the representation, the violence – home. I make efforts in visualizing pathways towards the emancipation of our physical, conceptual, and emotional landscapes, and work both within and outside of institutions in order to clarify, to make transparent, to undo some of the temporal manipulations and spatial paradigms of oppression that exist in and all around us. The work is persistence in opposition to permanence, to inspire functional histories for liberated social spaces in real-time.
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Sandy Williams IV did their undergraduate studies at the University of Virginia, and earned an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in the department of Sculpture + Extended Media. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Richmond. Recent exhibitions at Reynolds Gallery (Richmond), de boer Gallery (LA), Socrates Sculpture Park (New York), New Release (New York), Springsteen Gallery (Baltimore), Guadalajara 90210 (Mexico City), 1708 Gallery (Richmond). Residencies include ACA (Florida), MassMOCA (Massachusetts), SOMA (Mexico City), ACRE (Chicago), The University of Cumbria (UK), among others. Currently exhibiting at the University of Richmond Museum, and NADA House with New Release Gallery in NYC.

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