Join us for the opening party of Cydney Williams’ exhibition, Can You See the Purple?!

ArtsClub presents Can You See the Purple?, an exhibition featuring work by Cydney Williams (b. 1994). Williams centers her work in the vitality of place and its importance in the present moment. Her use of landscape and topographical maps are an exploration of her time spent in Santa Fe, New Mexico in residency from January to August 2022.

Williams’ landscapes, often reduced to simplified suns, moons, and horizon lines, convey the power of the vast desert and highlight the parallels between the exploitation of Earth’s resources and women’s labor for generations. As she condenses these grand natural experiences into a few lines and shapes she represents the power of the striking vistas New Mexico offers into symbols relaying the impact of the divine feminine; their marks often overlooked, but their power remaining omnipresent.

The focal point of the exhibition is two 48” X 48” oil paint collages titled Now That We Have Arrived I & II are presented as an acknowledgment of the past informing the present. Fraught with colonialism and native genocide, New Mexico has a complex history. Williams is transparent about where she comes from to distinguish that she is a guest of this sacred land. These works have years of her watercolor landscapes from places that are local to Cydney’s upbringing, cut and pasted to form the composition of these paintings. The effort to display Williams’ exploration of her individual relationship to her place hopes to translate as an invitation for the viewer to explore their individual relationship to their place, united as humbled visitors to protect and preserve the fragile and often unseen things. 

Exhibition Runs October 4 to November 4, 2022

Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Friday from 12:30-4:30pm

RSVP to the opening here: