KAHSANDRA WILLIAMS: “Skins of a Soft-less Strength: Material Memory, Identity, and ‘Inbetweeness’”

MFA Lecture

In this moving and interdisciplinary presentation, Williams explores the intersection of sculpture, performance, and identity through materials that carry memory: cotton, nylon, steel wire, and the body itself. Her work investigates labor, endurance, and reclamation, revealing how silence can be both burden and strength. Drawing from her experience as a veteran, artist, and mother, Williams examines the layered tensions between softness and steel, autonomy and obedience, race and belonging. Each act of making becomes a ritual of survival — a meditation on how materials, like people, hold the echoes of what they’ve endured.