Peter Williams was born in 1952, in Nyack, New York, and earned a B.F.A. from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art. At the humble age of 17, he was afforded the opportunity to have his first solo show as an artist, which was at the Pat Merenstein Gallery in Nyack, New York. This exhibit led to more shows in the region, including one at the historic Woodstock Music Festival. Williams was a genre-bending painter who explored the past and present of Black America through surreal narratives, and painful, but truthful depictions of what African Americans endured, both in the past and during the present. Last month, Williams passed away at the age of 69 due to health complications from an illness that he battled with for years. Peter Williams was known as a dedicated mentor, passionate to his craft and the development of other artist alike and dissimilar, and had recently retired from from the fine arts department at the University of Delaware, which he became apart of following a 17-year tenure at Wayne State University. Some of his many accolades include the Artists’ Legacy Foundation’s 2020 Artist Award and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. Williams’s most recent work focused on the killing of unarmed Black men and children by police in America. In the large-scale painting “The Arrest of George Floyd” (2020), Williams depicted Mr. Floyd screaming as disembodied white hands grab him and a blue eye looks on, unbothered. In another work that Peter Williams dedicated to George Floyd, Williams incorporates symbols of corporate greed, suggesting that America’s wealth is built on the suffering and exploitation of Black people. Williams’ paintings are held in highest regards, and can be found with the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, among other institutions. Peter Williams is a legend in the art world, and his contributions to style and American history are forever ingrained in the threads of American culture.
A.U.P 