Sandy Williams IV’s proposal for an art installation in Alexandria to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence was approved this week by the city’s Commission for the Arts.
The work, entitled “10:00,” will feature 600 limestone rulers stacked into a 40-inch-by-48-inch-by-50-inch box. Williams has calculated that if you walk at a pace of 1 mile per hour, you cover 17.6 inches every second. Every ruler in the piece will be 17.6 inches long, and Williams says that it takes about 10 minutes (600 seconds) to read the Declaration.
“Representing the time that it takes to read the Declaration of Independence is a way to consider the magnitude of this text’s importance, its influence, and its invisible presence in our everyday interactions and environments,” Williams said in his submission.
Williams, who lives in Richmond and teaches art at the University of Richmond, wants people to come up with their own interpretations of the Declaration.
“Part of my job as a professor and educator is getting my students to read,” Williams said. “We have so many of these cultural milestones, hallmarks in our country’s history, that we learn the interpretations of, but we aren’t necessarily tasked with creating our own interpretations of that thing. Here, instead of just asking AI what the Declaration of Independence means, before going to these other sources for, you know, a spoon-fed interpretation, this work will task them with reading it and thinking about it themselves.”
Williams is known for creating wax recreations of famous monuments, and has encouraged the public to light the wicks and burn them down. One statue, a six-foot-tall likeness of a seated Abraham Lincoln outside a D.C. elementary school, garnered big news when it melted in a heatwave. Another sculpture, a bronze monument commemorating enslaved workers at Roanoke College, showed hundreds of stacked books. On the spines of the books were names of former slaves.
The new work will be installed in May and will stay up until November. It will be accompanied by a QR code that leads viewers to a recording of Alexandria residents reading the Declaration for over 10 minutes.
“So often we’re thinking about these superheroes, these founding fathers, as the framers of our national identity,” Williams said. “But here we are, the millions that make up the nation who are so important, too, and we’re shaping what that national identity looks like.”
