Sandy Williams IV’s Wax Monument editions were for sale to support the Jackson Ward Youth Peace Team, and to celebrate the recent fall of many of Richmond's racist monuments. The Jackson Ward Youth Peace Team is a collective of Richmond-based youth leaders from diverse communities, backgrounds, and career paths. An essential objective of this organization is to collaborate and build safe spaces and opportunities for Richmond’s youth and neighborhoods. Purchasing these artworks gives you agency over the form and fate of these monument candles, in support of a community organization that encourages our city’s youth through self-love, self-advocacy, and practices of creativity. We encourage you to find out more about who they are on their website: Jackson Ward Youth Peace Team

Williams began making these Wax Monuments after witnessing the Unite the Right (White Nationalist) Rally in 2017, centered around Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee monument. Williams’ “anti-monuments” are sculptural candles produced using 3D scans of specific US monuments that are then miniaturized and cast in wax. Williams writes, “I am interested in visualizing change and building monuments able to keep a living record of activity. By circulating miniature wax versions of existing monuments, people are given agency over these forms that are normally immobile, and until recently, were legally untouchable.” Find out more about the artist at their website: Sandy Williams IV or from this article.

Project Impact:

• $6,672.00 in support to the Jackson Ward Youth Peace Team
• 86 Candles are now burning on mantles across the United States

This project is being generously supported by 1708 Gallery, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU, through logistical coordination, mailing, support of labor, and the purchasing of materials.