Nominated by Dazed 100er Alima Lee

“What would the world look like if Black women were believed?” This question lies at the heart of artist, writer, editor and publisher Kandis Williams’s practice. Driven by what she has described as her “collage brain”, the Baltimore-born powerhouse creates razor-sharp explorations of conventional discourse. Her work uses video, collage, performance and readings to peel back layers of myth; revealing a paradigm liberated from the constraints of Western cultural hegemony.

As founder of Cassandra Press, the Los Angeles-based publishing platform that produces lo-fi printed matter, artist books and exhibitions about ethics, aesthetics, femme-driven activism and Black scholarship, Williams is just as at ease navigating the complexities of critical theory and historical literature as she is parsing the worlds of Black Twitter and Tik Tok. With two new exhibitions unfolding in 2021, including participation in the Los Angeles biennial Made in L.A. 2020: a version at the Hammer Museum and her own retrospective, Kandis Williams: A Field, at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Williams brings the lives of Black women front and center in the art world.

Text Miss Rosen