Painter of Black Experience Peter Williams dies at 69


Peter Williams, whose colorful paintings—sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing, often both—reflecting his own history, Black history, and current issues such as police brutality and mass incarceration, died August 19 in Wilmington, Del. He was 69 years old.

His wife, Elishka Vitanovska Mayer, said the cause was a heart attack.

Mr Williams It was first exhibited as a teenager—he presented paintings for sale at the Woodstock music festival in 1969—and has been prolific for half a century. Its output was huge and constantly changing. Some of his works were abstract, some figurative; some represented an inner monologue in which he tried to define his own identity; some spoke directly and openly to current events.

In recent years, he has noted several series inspired by high-profile murders of blacks by police officers – a group of paintings heavily in blue tones, evoking the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. in 2014; A triptych on George Floyd, who was killed in Minneapolis in 2020; and more.

Other recent series, mass incarceration and Colin Kaepernick, former NFL quarterback and social justice activist. A group of paintings made from 2015 to 2017, again inspired by Black killings, featured a Black superhero named N-Word. Dressed in yellow and red and using the American flag as a cloak, he arrives in scenes where Blacks need help, some spooky, some almost comical.

“I associate it with the Black exploitation films of the 70s,” said Mr Williams. He told Michigan Radio In 2016, he revealed the idea behind his superhero. “Often the protagonist of some of these movies was a vile life or a pimp or someone with little respect, but in the end he was successful for his community.”

Another series, “Black Exodus” (2019-20), took the view that the planet had become unrecoverable thanks to the pressure and environmental degradation of white culture – it depicted Afro-futurists fleeing in vintage cars modified for space travel.

“There was no point in going back to Africa at this point,” he explained. Zoom artist speaking this year, “because there may not be a planet Earth.”

Some whites were offended by the images of Mr Williams – for example, he would sometimes portray police officers as pigs. Some Blacks also found things to dislike in their paintings; among them, the use of bards or the figure of Aunt Jemima in some works, which they thought perpetuated racial stereotypes.

“Williams has a knack for annoying the audience, but he does it with style,” Joy Hakanson Colby wrote in The Detroit News in 2006 when Mr. Williams had an exhibit in Ferndale, Mich. ”

Mr Williams, who lives in Wilmington and is represented by the gallery Luis DeJesus Los Angeles, said that his strong image reflected a personal pursuit as much as any political expression.

“It amazes me that people procrastinate because of my work,” he told The Detroit Free Press in 2002. “It’s not just about race, it’s about my family and how I struggle to find my place in society.”

Sometimes one of his paintings featured a figure of a Black male with artificial legs, sometimes naked. It was a representation of Mr Williams himself.

In 1972, while he was a student at the University of New Mexico, he was a passenger in a car speeding over a 250-foot cliff near Albuquerque. He lost his right leg above the knee. His wife said he’s been in the hospital for seven months.

“His life,” he said via email, “was a lesson in self-discipline and willpower.”

Peter Beresford Williams was born on March 18, 1952, in Suffern, NY, Rockland County, the child of Goldburn Beresford Williams and Jacqueline Lucille (Banks) Williams. He grew up in the Hudson River village of Nyack, where his father was a real estate developer. Peter Williams later admitted that, given the region’s relative racial diversity, it took him some time to understand the struggles Black people face elsewhere in the country.

He graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1975 and earned a master’s degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1987. He took a job as an associate professor at Wayne State University in Detroit that year; He said the move helped him deepen his understanding of urban racial tensions and gave him a closer look at what he called a “hard life and racial background filled with poverty.”

Mr Williams has moved University of Delaware He would retire from there in 2004 and this month.

While at Wayne State, he spent time in Spain, and many of his works show the influence of Goya and other Spanish masters, but he also drew on traditional African imagery and pop culture. The Free Press once described his work as “Salvador Dalí meets Walt Disney”.

The juxtapositions in his work can be jarring.

When Mr Williams opened an exhibition at the New Jersey Visual Arts Center in Summit in 2007, Thomas Micchelli Wrote on Brooklyn Rail“Williams’ depictions of Ronald McDonald, Mouseketeer hats, and M&Ms combined with blatantly racist and sometimes obscene imagery make them feel like scraps scraped from the tangled grass of an empty lot lined with dead cat-smelling bricks.”

Julie L. McGee curated this show and later became a colleague at the University of Delaware.

“Peter Williams was a fearless artist,” he said via email. “The combination of Acerbic wit, social commentary, and beauty let her work do the talking. and transcend the momentary.”

In addition to his wife, he is survived by Mr Williams’ two stepson, Paul and Daniel Mayer.

Ms McGee noted that Mr Williams’ strange or disturbing work requires attention.

“Williams conveyed the pain with exuberant colour, pattern and geometry,” he said. “We can’t and won’t dare to take our eyes off it.”



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