Delaware-based artist Peter Williams has won the Artists’ Legacy Foundation’s 2020 Artist Award, a $25,000 prize granted annually to a painter or sculptor who has made significant contributions to their field and whose work “shows evidence of the hand.” The foundation, which is headquartered in Oakland, California, named Howardena Pindell as last year’s winner. 

Artist Peter Williams has been awarded the 2020 Artist Award through the Artists’ Legacy Foundation, which boasts a $25,000 (~£19,000) grant. Williams’ oeuvre centres on themes of racism, incarceration, police brutality, voyeurism and environmental topics through a vibrant, figurative manner that invites viewers to search for “clues and insight about the Black experience.”

Peter Williams Wins Artists’ Legacy Foundation 2020 Award – The Delaware-based artist, who has spent four decades documenting current and historical events in brightly colored works that highlight the Black American experience with wit and humor, has won the annual $25,000 award. Williams incorporates scenes of police brutality, slavery, environmental damage, and cultural stereotypes into his work, and his most recent series chronicles the life of an Afrofuturist superhero.

The Artists’ Legacy Foundation named Peter Williams as the recipient of its 2020 Artist Award, which grants $25,000 to a “painter or sculptor who has made significant contributions to their field and whose work shows evidence of the hand,” according to a press release. Over the course of more than forty years, Williams’s painting practice has reflected on racism, police brutality, incarceration, and environmentalism, often through a vivid, figurative lens.

Peter Williams is an African American artist whose exemplary career spans more than forty years. While teaching at the University of Delaware for fifteen years, though he is now retired, and before that at Wayne State University for seventeen, he also exhibited extensively. Williams paints both figuratively and abstractly, focusing on formal qualities like color, pattern and paint application, as well as on content that stems from current events and includes topics like racial discrimination and climate change. In his exhibition Black Universe (a concurrent exhibition of related works is on at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit), he presents a series of paintings that are informed by a fantastic narrative about a journey to outer space in search of a better world.

Peter Williams is this year’s recipient of the Artists’ Legacy Foundation’s annual Artist Award, which comes with an unrestricted $25,000 purse. Williams is known for his vibrant paintings and works on paper that address racism, mass incarceration, environmental destruction, and other current issues. The artist’s works often contain references to allegories, personal experiences, pop culture, and art history. “I’m trying to be subversive by saying underneath all this humor is something we’d better start paying attention to,” he has said of his practice. “And I’m using the signs and symbols and signifiers that I learned from the Western tradition of oil painting.”

IN EARLY AUGUST, artist Peter Williams presented The George Floyd Triptych (2020), at Untitled, Art Online, the art fair’s inaugural virtual event. The work, which depicts the arrest, death, and burial of Floyd in three panels, was the central focus of the Luis De Jesus Los Angeles virtual booth. Untitled, Art hosted a Zoom conversation with Williams and critic John Yau. The two discussed the paintings and the artist’s lengthy career.

Peter Williams was awarded the Artists’ Legacy Foundation‘s 2020 Artist Award.

There is no precedent for 2020 and no reference point for this particular confluence of events. The injustices and inequalities that afflict some of us have been magnified by toxic politics, a crumbling public health infrastructure, economic collapse, and racism that has been nurtured and protected by the institutions that make the United States what it is. "If you're on a planet beaten and tortured over and over, there's an inner world we get transported to. Little by little you realize you are building a new world." -Peter Williams

Peter Williams’ query is one with a storied lineage within the Black community. Over the course of 45 years, Williams, a senior professor of painting at the University of Delaware with time spent in the Detroit arts community and as a professor at Wayne State University, has tackled problematic social structures of white supremacy and discrimination with uncensored perspectives. Curious and inquisitive, he is often in a state of mental travel and critical culture investigation within his practice.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit launched its Peter Williams: Black Universe exhibition at the beginning of the year, but it has since become particularly timely. Former Wayne State University instructor Peter Williams employs allegories, historical allusions, and references to his own personal experiences to create colorful and lively abstract works. Black Universe is a commentary on dominant modern culture that addresses social issues, such as discrimination and climate change, making it the ideal learning experience for those of us seeking a fresh or expanded perspective on race and culture in light of recent injustices and unrest.

Seemingly at an opposite pole from Ruznic’s tenuous phantasmatic visions is the often ferocious, sometimes grotesque pictorial imagination of Peter Williams. He’s an artist that I didn’t discover via social media—though I follow him now on Instagram—but in a more old-fashioned way: I saw a painting of his, earlier this year, reproduced on a book’s cover. The book is a new novel by one of my very favorite writers, Lynn Crawford’s Paula Regossy, but the cover image so fascinated me that I almost had to force myself to move past it to the book’s interior.

Compelling works intertwine art historical references, allegories, current events, and personal life experiences. In this two-part exhibition, which presents more than two dozen paintings, the artist addresses difficult social issues, such as racial discrimination and climate change, through symbolic imagery, grotesque figures, and vibrant compositions. Now a professor of painting at the University of Delaware, Williams taught for 17 years at Wayne State University in Detroit and was a well-established member of the arts community.

Peter Williams: Black Universe at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. With vibrant palettes and expressive drawing presenting scenes and figures from an off-beat Afrofuturist fantasy, Williams’ paintings have the energy of folk and Outsider style and the pure imagination of science fiction. The world they describe is both a possible reality ahead and a revisitation of ancestral tradition from the past — and ultimately a metaphor for the inner work of reframing identity and consciousness. 

This exhibition is concurrent with William’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). His extremely colorful and attention-grabbing paintings combine abstract and figurative elements. The gallery’s press release described them as, “seductive paintings intertwining art historical references…. with current events and personal life experiences.” After briefly seeing his cartoonish characters on my computer screen, I couldn’t seem to get them out of my head. It was like a straight shot of Vodka. It’s no surprise that Williams refers to color as his, “gateway drug” that entices the viewer to engage with his paintings.

Originally scheduled to open in March, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles’s second solo show with artist Peter Williams is now opening at last. The show will run concurrent to Williams’s solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and the art space Trinosophes. In this exhibition, Williams “tells an Afrofuturist tale of a brown-skinned race that escapes to outer space in search of new planet homes and an end to the cycles of oppression from which they have been subjected.”

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce Peter Williams: Black Universe, the artist's second solo exhibition with the Gallery, on view from July 9 through October 10, 2020. This exhibition* is held concurrent to, and is an extension of, his solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and the alternative space Trinosophes.

"So, I think about Peter’s paintings. I think about their fundamental contradiction. They are an exquisite gutting. He paints, with reverence, the eviscerated body of monumental oppression. His artistic kin include Grünewald, Kahlo, Salcedo and Marshall. I think about what Peter refuses us—illusion and comfort. And I think and about what he gives us—empathy, and a deep love for painting..."

"Making things allows one to be a member of a group: of ideas, forms, awareness, sensitivities, none of which is ever in isolation. You can always feel the spirit of those fleeting thoughts and mega-disciplines which keep you in focus and feeling alive while having an exploration in paint. I have discussions with myself; I become the Other."

Artist Peter Williams created The Death of George Floyd, a 48-inch-by-60-inch oil on canvas in response to Floyd’s Memorial Day death, which has invigorated civil disobedience by drawing attention to centuries of institutionalized racism. “My work has always had a political ethos, it comes out of my self-awareness as a black American. This work is a compendium of modernist form and the politics of right now. I had been working, shifting the work toward a more abstract base. I had always been a figurative narrative painter,” said Williams.

Peter Williams doesn’t make things easy for the viewer, and why should he? Peter Williams is a painter who paints both abstractly and figuratively, with a jaunty, cake frosting palette as the main connection between the two approaches. I first saw his work in the 2002 Whitney Biennial (March 7–May 26, 2002), curated by Lawrence R. Rinder, Chrissie Iles, Christian Paul, and Debra Singer.

If comedy equals tragedy plus time, artist Peter Williams is defying the mathematics of the aphorism in his newest paintings. In his works, Williams compresses time and expands painterly space to extract a subversive sense of humor from acts of violence and oppression, even in the midst of their perpetuation. “Peter Williams: Incarceration,” a show of his work on view at the Cressman Center, tackles themes of black incarceration — both historical and contemporary — through paintings that sing with exuberant form and hyperbolic color. The overall effect is, by turns, shocking, joyful and unnerving.

From December 5–8, the 17th annual NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance) art fair took place at Ice Palace Studios, focused on supporting new voices in the contemporary art community. Fairgoers were also treated to solo showings of artists like Agnieszka Brzezanska (BWA Warszawa), Guadalupe Maravilla (Jack Barrett), Ariana Papademetropoulos (Soft Opening), Aaron Gilbert (Lulu), and Peter Williams (Luis De Jesus Los Angeles).

8. Luis De Jesus Los Angeles A new series of works by Peter Williams on view at Luis de Jesus’s booth is not to miss. Within the busy patterns and cheerful color palette, Williams tackles issues of race and representation, power dynamics, and oppression in his dizzying tableaux. Booth F17, Pier 90
 

A Los Angeles Presence: Ramekin may not be in L.A. anymore, but other dealers hailing from the city were out in force. Kayne Griffin Corcoran sold a Llyn Foulkes work for $60,000 and three Mika Tajima pieces for $7,000 each. A Mary Corse painting was on reserve for a price around $400,000. Luis De Jesus sold two Peter Williams paintings for around $20,000 to $30,000 each.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds (2018) is subdivided by a tree whose branches spread across the canvas, filling it with foliage painted by means of closely packed green dots, patches of sky denoted by blue dots, and passages of red dots interspersed throughout. Among the branches are six birds and three human faces, two of the faces in profile are barely evident, the third, fully articulated face, looks out from the trunk’s base.

Peter Williams’ pointillist painting technique, crowding thousands of tiny dots of enamel color within pencil-drawn contours of people, places and things, is not the same as the celebrated one pioneered more than a century ago by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. His look yields a very different feel from the measured, careful tone of those French Postimpressionists. Brash color is plainly important to the 14 Williams paintings in his Los Angeles debut at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, most (though not all) of which explode with pointillist dots.

We carried onward with excitement to Luis De Jesus gallery where we were met by the work of Peter Williams for his opening, River of Styx. The show’s array of colorful, multi-figurative, narrative pieces was seemingly bright and cheery, yet it alluded to a heavier history. With the political climate so out of wack, Williams’s images address topics quiet poignantly. I had the treat of talking to the delightful artist as he explained that his paintings composed of many marks, were in fact not pointillism.

News media, despite respective biases, seem to agree in the description of contemporary politics as  “complicated” and “divided.” While accurate, this semantic admission fails to demonstrate the accountability of the status quo. Soul Recordings, a group exhibition currently on view at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, examines ideas around representation and meaning amid the persisting trauma of colonial histories.

The opening movement of “Soul Recordings” is a polka-dot revelry, a bedazzled wake-up call, a cymbal-clap altarpiece, a plastic-bead trumpet blast, and a monster of a skull-ringed, glitter-bombed orchestral chord breaking in fuchsia major. This is Ebony G. Patterson’s heartbreaking and eminently Instagrammable mixed media installation work, and the poignant grandeur of its regal and folkloric memento mori is alert and ineffable.

Soul Recordings, at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. A group exhibition featuring works by artists such as Lisa C. Soto, Deborah Roberts, Caitlin Cherry and Lex Brown shines a spotlight on our state of political unease. This includes work that examines neocolonial architecture, painting that toys with the nature of stereotype and textile work that takes on issues of gender. Accompanying the exhibition will be an essay written by independent curator Jill Moniz, who organized the very compelling show of sculpture by African American female artists at the Landing last year.

Peter Williams makes art to bear witness, he told Bradley Rubenstein back in March. This challenging interview, conducted at a time when police brutality against Black men and women is more visible than ever, shows the seasoned painter thinking about the purpose of art history and grappling with how his art enters the broader conversation between politics and history.

Curator Trevor Schoonmaker has given the title “The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp” to his edition of Prospect New Orleans, the just-opened fourth installment of an ambitious art fest that has evolved into a triennial affair.

The list of participating artists for Prospect.4, titled “The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp,” has been made public. The triennial exhibition, spread across seventeen venues in New Orleans, will feature seventy-three artists from “North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the European powers that colonized New Orleans, addressing issues of identity, displacement, and cultural hybridity within the context of the celebration of the city’s tricentennial,” according to an announcement from the event’s organizers.

Although I have known Peter Williams for decades, and have written about his work in the past, we had never sat down and done a proper interview—it’s been more of a 30-year-long conversation. Recently, however, I wanted to get down his thoughts on several of his latest bodies of work: urgent paintings that are at once timely and have art historical resonance. His inclusion in the November group exhibition As Carriers of Flesh, at David & Schweitzer, saw the artist confronting Whiteness and police brutality against black men and women in colorful canvases that unite history, biography, and allegory. 

Williams is an African-American artist whose youth coincided with the galvanizing events of the Civil Rights era. His three other works in the show, all large oil paintings (six feet on the longer side), are racked by the presence of a malevolent white man — part clown, part ogre, all cannibal. As with the bucktoothed head in “Watercolor I,” inexplicable beings pop out of the ogres’ faces, but this time it’s tiny black people doing the popping.

A great deal of art leverages mystique by processing experience through varying layers of abstraction. The N-Word, a new collection of paintings by the artist Peter Williams — published by Rotland Press and with contributions by writers Lynn Crawford and Bill Harris — does the opposite: it lays out a response to systemic violence against people of color by the police in graphic and direct terms.

The 2014 deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police — to name but two of the highest-profile such incidents in that, or any, year — catalyzed a series of in-your-face, unapologetically brash paintings that Peter Williams finished in a concerted burst last winter, on view at New York’s Novella Gallery through April 5. 

Peter Williams—who is sixty and black—is having his first solo exhibition of paintings in New York. And not one to ever play it safe, he is exhibiting two distinct bodies of work at Foxy Production (February 15, 2013–March 23, 2013)—three smallish abstract paintings and five large figurative ones—which share a palette of pinks, violets, blues, turquoises, reds, greens and yellows.

Peter Williams is a troubling painter for troubling reasons. There is a disconnect between his sophisticated paint handling—which can veer from dry pointillist dots to hard-sculpted tonalities to bejeweled washes and drips, all in the same picture—and the low-culture effrontery of his images.

Where does the body end and the world begin? It's a question of philosophy and science, and in Peter Williams' exhibition of oil paintings and watercolors at the newly opened Paul Kotula Projects, it's a question of portraiture as well. This show is the perfect inaugural for former Revolution Gallery director Paul Kotula's new space.

Celebrated painter and Wayne State University professor Peter William speaks with a self-confidence balanced by a strong sense of humility, evidenced in his trademark line: "I don't want people to think I am just a legend in my own mind. But for the most part that's the way I feel most of the time." When he says with a hearty laugh and a warm smile "I barely even have a leg to stand on" the painter acknowledges and comes to terms with the subject of the leg he lost in an accident as a young man.

A woman wearing painfully plain clothes is staring out of very freaked-out, unblinking eyes while sitting on a chair in front of Detroit artist Peter Williams’ painting on the second floor of New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art. A small but intensely observant group clusters around her while one youngish fellow interrogates her.