For more than 45 years Peter Williams chronicled current and historical events, interspersing pictorial narratives with personal anecdotes and fictional characters in order to create vibrant paintings about the diverse experiences of Black Americans. With boldness and humor, he tackled the darkest of subjects including, but not limited to, police brutality, lynching, slavery, mass incarceration, and other realms of racial oppression. Williams used cultural criticism to form new creation myths, retelling the history of America from fresh and cosmic perspectives.
Williams’ last paintings addressed a range of subjects including oppressive social structures, white supremacy, police brutality, abuse of power, and political activism. In his series, Black Exodus, Williams told 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. The tale that Williams had envisioned is a journey of consciousness and conscience, a metaphor for the inner and outer travels that all of us must undertake to confront the truth about race and ourselves.
Williams was born 1952 in Nyack, NY. He earned his MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and his BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He was the recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize, and the 2020 Artists’ Legacy Foundation Artist Award. Other awards include the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (2018), Joan Mitchell Awards (2004, 2007), Ford Foundation Fellowships (1985, 1987), and McKnight Foundation Fellowship (1983). He was the Senior Professor, Fine Arts Department, University of Delaware and taught at Wayne State University for 17 years prior.
