Standing in his studio on the south side of Chicago at the beginning of this winter, abstract painter and architect Amanda Williams A dark blue form was surprised to fill the canvas with the tone of the ground that the day before poured color. The Williams process is accurate but smooth; He knows where the color should hit the canvas, but gives up its spread. For her, a spectral figure-a little, hunched and bent-which manifested itself frightening overnight, jumped not only from the color, but from the soil itself was made of Z-albama rich in iron, Williams had its cousin ship in buckets via Fed-Ex. And for Williams, the image was unshakable.
When he came across this form, Williams said and felt like the magical spirits of the past. “It was like my God, there are.” Will come back. We brought them back. ”
This first (friendly) scary work is one of the 20 new paintings and 10 collages that Williams presents in its current show “Run together and look ugly after the first rain” in the Casey Kaplan Gallery in Chelsea, until April 26. The image “maybe well invented”, just like all the work on the show, focuses on Hluboká, midnight blue. It is a pigment that Williams, along with two material scientific laboratories, for three years for development. Or rather re -create.
Blue was created in the workshop George Washington Carver, A food scientist Tuskegee known mainly for his research of peanuts. Carver was an amateur painter who developed and patented his own pigments, including the Prussian blue, from Alabama soil black farmers worked at the turn of the 20th century.
Williams first encountered a reference to Carver’s Prussian Blue in examining patents of black inventors for her multimedia installation from 2021 to black inventiveness in “Reconstruction: Architecture and Darkness in America,” Group exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art. “He was on one of these black inventors,” Williams recalled. “At first I didn’t pay attention because I thought it would be something with peanuts, but when I looked again, I saw that it was saying blue.” In fact, Carver’s 1927 Patent described the refining soil of red clay into color and dye.
After working on several other projects, Williams returned to the patent in 2022. “It all started with a simple, innocent question: What would take to restore Carver’s blue?” She said. Williams quickly realized that the revival of the idea on your own would be extremely difficult. “The patent is extremely vague.” It’s clear enough, so you know that Carver knows what he’s doing, but it’s not clear enough to watch the recipe for cooking. “Williams also added,” I’m not a chemist. “
When the President of the University of Chicago Paul Alivisatos, distinguishing Chemist, Williams heard enthusiastically discussing Carver’s recipe for a university event, offered her access to his laboratory to help re -create a pigment. After the summer experimenting a group of student scientists successfully created a small dose. For painting, however, Williams needed production scaling. She turned to the German company Kremer Pigments Inc., where its founder Dr. Georg Kremer modified the recipe. Kremer eventually made 100 pounds of powder pigment, of which only small quantities are needed to create a gallon of color.
But Williams was fascinated by more than just Carver’s chemistry. His boldness also spoke to her. “Of the 44 bulletins that Carver wrote, he spoke only about color and beauty,” Williams said with a 1911 -reference to 1911. “
Williams, an architect trained by Cornell, has a deep understanding of color. Her work, which is shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, in the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, at the Venetian Biennale and three exhibitions at Moma, examines propaganda power of colors. Williams uses color to alchemize full of history into the manifestations of joy and resistance, thus putting the past into a new, pulsating and politically conscious view.
Since childhood, Williams has understood how space and infrastructure have dictated the possibilities provided to different communities. “We have the best architecture in the world in Chicago,” she said. “But that’s not what inspired me.” Instead, it was attracted to inequality issues. “I asked, how did our streets not breastfeeding?” Where did the building go? ”
For her 2015 “Color Theory (ED)”, Williams covered eight houses scheduled for demolition on the Chicago southern side in bold colors – “currency exchange yellow”, “Flamin” hot orange “,” Royal Purple Crown “. “I come from the south side, you know, very black.” And black people like to show off, ”Williams said with a laugh. “Lights of alcohol store, flashing, Neon Green tires.” Each color is brighter than the one next to it. That was my first palette. ”
In 2022, Williams still explored the full chapter of South Side’s history in “redefinting redining”, a public installation of 100,000 red tulips planted via free Chicago LOTS, and watched the former boundaries of discriminatory policies of home -known loans.
“The most important and beautiful message of Amand’s works is that the past is not the past,” he said Madeleine GrynszsejnThe director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA Chicago), where Williams organized its first solo show of the museum in 2017. “It is still very with us – especially American history of racism, American disinvestics history in communities and hope for the restoration of the community.” She added: “Amanda knows how to acknowledge and offer an olive branch in difficult history.”
The same year Williams also exposed “Candyladyblack” In Gagosian, New York, a series that paid tribute to black women who sell candies and small goods from their homes and on the streets. Nine saturated paintings were reimaginated by everyday ten candy – Jolly Ranchers, Frooties, Stix and Bubble Gum – so lively that phosphorescence shone.
“Amanda understands tactically, strategically and historically,” he said Michelle Kuo, Main curator at freedom and publisher on Moma. “It is not only its visual impact, but also to map ideas to a place, memory and black culture.” That’s really her superpower. ”
When Williams found Carver’s creative writings, she was hit by his own desire to bring modernist color to the southern landscape, take the raw materials of agricultural land and to encourage black farmers to turn them into something beautiful. “Carver just tried to show people how to make things from what they had already,” she said. “It was very handy, very simple, but desire was beauty.”
And the fact that Carver developed a modernist palette at about the same time Le Corbusier improved his own, emphasized the greater truth: whose innovations are celebrated and whose forgotten? For Williams, this was another example of how black creativity, invention and ingenuity are often overlooked. In this sense, Williams found an unexpected creative and intellectual relationship with the scientist.
In her studio Williams, she experimented with a prussian blue, layering, dilution and pouring color, letting her burst, pool and bleed over canvas. The apparition on the first canvas was the only full human form that materialized. “We tried ten times to happen again,” Williams recalled. “No.” I just accepted what it was. “The rest of the resulting images – such as evocatively called” Historical Confession, Gap for Blue “and” Blue smells like we were out ” – created their own spirits, nor fully figurative, nor completely abstract. Some suggest torso while others mention on Landscape, rivers or veins. “There is something anthropomorphic about this work,” Williams said. “I didn’t force it.” That’s what it did powerful. ”
But while ghosts can live in color, Williams’ goal is not just to reappear the past, but to expand it. “I want to make sure that the work just costs itself,” Williams said. “It doesn’t just have to carry a luggage of history.” This color, Williams added, is something closer to “Amanda Carver Blue”.
