NASHER MUSEUM OF ART AT DUKE UNIVERSITY ACQUIRES PETER WILLIAMS' SPECIAL K (KAEPERNICK STANDING)

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce that Peter Williams's painting Special K (Kaepernick Standing), 2018, has been accessioned into the collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The painting is currently on view at the Nasher in the exhibition In Relation to Power: Politically Engaged Works from the Collection through February 13, 2022. In 2020, Williams was awarded the Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize and this acquisition was a direct result of that award. The gallery is grateful to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for making this gift possible. Special K (Kaepernick Standing) joins Birdland as the second Williams painting to enter the Nasher Museum of Art collection. 

Peter Williams did not have sports heroes and generally dismissed them as players in the political sense. But Colin Kaepernick proved to be very different from the average player. Williams states that "he has a point of view that includes his race (in the old days he would be considered a "race man"), which is rare amongst the plethora of sports heroes. And he took to the knee to defy the lack of resistance to the killing of Blacks in America. He has turned his political stance into an ethos of respectability and resistance for all people."

The composition of this work is based on a 1912 photograph of ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinski by Baron de Meyer. Nijinski danced the leading role in Diaghilev's The Afternoon of a Faun which premiered on May 29, 1912 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Interestingly, the editor of the daily Le Figaro, Gaston Calmette, was quick to denounce the ballet and criticized the choreography of Nijinski's faun as being "filthy" and "indecent", which he argued deservedly incited the booing and heckling at the showings. A big fan of the opera and theater as well as an excellent student of history, it is quite possible that Peter Williams was aware of this fact and saw a parallel to Kaepernick's own situation.