1. Amanda Williams and the Haunting Beauty of the Past
In her South Side Chicago studio earlier this winter, abstract painter and architect Amanda Williams found herself captivated by an unexpected apparition on one of her canvases. The day before, she had poured paint onto an earth-toned canvas, allowing it to diffuse naturally. When she returned, a dark, spectral form—a hunched, bent body—had emerged. To Williams, this figure wasn’t just a result of the paint’s movement but a manifestation of the soil from which the paint was made: Alabama soil rich in iron, shipped to her in buckets by her cousin via FedEx. This eerie yet profound moment felt like a conjuring of the past, as if the spirits of history had returned.
The painting, titled She May Well Have Invented Herself, is part of Williams’ current exhibition, Run Together and Look Ugly After the First Rain, at Casey Kaplan Gallery in Chelsea, which runs through April 26. The exhibition features 20 new paintings and 10 collages, all centered around a deep midnight blue pigment that Williams spent three years reconstructing. This blue originated from George Washington Carver, the renowned food scientist who also developed his own pigments, including a Prussian blue, from the soil of Alabama.
2. The Journey to Reconstruct Carver’s Blue
Amanda Williams first encountered George Washington Carver’s Prussian blue while researching Black inventors for her 2021 multimedia installation on Black ingenuity, which was part of the group exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art. Initially, she overlooked Carver, assuming he was only associated with peanuts. But upon revisiting his work, she discovered his 1927 patent for refining red clay soil into paint and dye.
Intrigued by the challenge of recreating Carver’s pigment, Williams returned to the project in 2022. However, the vague instructions in Carver’s patent made the task daunting. After a summer of experimentation with a team of student researchers from the University of Chicago, they successfully produced a small batch of the pigment. To scale production, Williams collaborated with Kremer Pigments Inc., a German company that refined the recipe, ultimately producing 100 pounds of powder pigment. For Williams, the journey was as much about Carver’s chemistry as it was about his boldness and vision.
3. A Shared Vision of Beauty and Resilience
Carver’s audacity to focus on beauty at a time of survival resonated deeply with Williams. As an architect and artist, she has always understood the power of color to transform and elevate. Her work, which has been exhibited at institutions like MoMA, the Venice Biennale, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, explores how color can alchemize fraught histories into expressions of joy, resilience, and political awareness.
For Williams, color is not just a visual tool but a way to map ideas of place, memory, and Black culture. Her 2015 project, Color(ed) Theory, exemplifies this philosophy. She painted eight South Side Chicago homes scheduled for demolition in vibrant, bold colors—“Currency Exchange yellow,” “Flamin’ Hot orange,” and “Crown Royal purple.” These colors were inspired by consumer products associated with Black life in America, reflecting a culture of celebration and resistance.
4. Exploring the Intersection of Art and History
Amanda Williams’ work is deeply rooted in the history of racism and disinvestment in Black communities. Her 2022 installation, Redefining Redlining, used 100,000 red tulips to trace the boundaries of discriminatory home lending policies on Chicago’s South Side. The project not only highlighted the systemic inequities of the past but also offered a message of hope and restoration.
Madeleine Grynsztejn, director of MCA Chicago, where Williams staged her first solo museum show in 2017, describes her work as a testament to the enduring presence of history. “The past is not past,” Grynsztejn said. “Amanda knows how to both acknowledge and offer an olive branch to a difficult history.” This duality—acknowledging pain while offering hope—is central to Williams’ artistic vision.
5. The Collaboration with Carver’s Legacy
When Williams discovered Carver’s creative writings, she was struck by his desire to bring Modernist color to the Southern landscape. Carver’s work was not just about chemistry but about empowerment—encouraging Black farmers to take the raw materials of their land and turn them into something beautiful. This D.I.Y. ethos resonated with Williams, who sees her work as a continuation of Carver’s legacy.
In her studio, Williams experimented with the Prussian blue, layering, diluting, and pouring the paint to allow it to crack, pool, and bleed across the canvas. The resulting paintings, such as Historical Elisions, Gap for Blue and Blue Smells Like We Been Outside, are neither fully figurative nor entirely abstract. Instead, they evoke ghostly forms, suggestive of torsos, landscapes, and veins. Williams describes this work as anthropomorphic, a reflection of her own creative process.
6. Celebrating Black Creativity and Innovation
Amanda Williams’ work is not just about history; it’s about expanding the narrative of the past and challenging whose innovations are celebrated. Carver’s Modernist palette, developed around the same time as Le Corbusier’s, underscores a larger truth: Black creativity and resourcefulness are often overlooked.
For Williams, her collaboration with Carver’s legacy is a way to honor this overlooked history. The deep midnight blue she has created feels like her own—something she calls “Amanda Carver blue.” It’s a testament to the enduring power of Black ingenuity and the shared vision of beauty and resilience that links her work to Carver’s.
Williams’ current exhibition is a reminder that the past is not just something to be remembered but something to be felt, transformed, and reimagined. Through her art, she invites us to see history not as a burden but as a source of inspiration and renewal.