RIP Peter Williams

Peter Williams (1952-2021) Photo: Kathy F. Atkinson

On August 19, we lost one of the great Detroit painters, Peter Williams. He had been in and out of the hospital recently and this time he didn't make it.

I remember meeting Peter when first he came to Detroit. At the time he was doing abstract paintings, kind of in the manner of Sean Scully, and quite frankly I wasn't particularly interested in them. As time wore on and he became increasingly embedded in the city, his work took on a more soul-searching character. He began to question issues of identity, all the while slapping on the pigment with increasing mastery.

My intersection with Peter's work was heightened by a class I took in winter 2001 with cultural critics Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall at the New School for Social Research in New York on representations of race and gender in American culture. One of the books we read was Constance Rourke's American Humor: A Study of the National Character, published in 1931. (It remains a classic and everyone interested in American folkways needs to read it.) In it, Rourke discusses the three archetypes of American humor: the Yankee peddler, the backswoodsman, and the minstrel. 

It was this last archetype that resonated with me in relation to Peter's work. It's important to note that Rourke's understanding of minstrelsy predates its appropriation by white culture particularly after the Civil War. Minstrelsy, in Rourke's view, was originally a subversion, a mechanism for enslaved Blacks to "put Massah on," much like the Cakewalk that made fun of white body carriage only to then be picked up by whites who weren't hip to the dis. I saw the reclamation and reversal of the white minstrel trope to be key to what Peter was up to and my suspicion was confirmed in conversations we had during a solo exhibition he happened to be having at Revolution Gallery. The result was the essay published in the November/December 2001 issue of New Art Examiner titled "Peter Williams's Black Humor." (I have uploaded a scan to Google Drive, which can be viewed here.) 

"Peter Williams's Black Humor" remains one of the best things I have ever written, though the beginning and ending were fucked up by bad edits in part because I was communicating from Brooklyn via fax with NAE literally as the smoke was still billowing over the East River in the wake of September 11. I was thrilled when the next year a reference to the article was contained in the catalog for the 2002 Whitney Biennial in which two of Peter's works appeared.

One of the saddest things about Peter's passing is that he was still on an upward swing. In 2020, he won an Artists' Legacy Foundation Award and more recently a Guggenheim. He also had simultaneous shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Trinosophes, and Paul Kotula Gallery. 

There was some comfort in knowing he was out there in the world, working away (he once claimed to be "hardest working artist in Detroit") and cutting through all the bullshit. I will miss him.