Peter Williams
On the Way, 2019
Oil on canvas
72 x 96 in.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is proud to announce that Peter Williams has been awarded a 2022 USA Fellowship from United States Artists. USA Fellowships are $50,000 unrestricted awards, with a year of financial planning, that recognize artists for their contributions to the field and allow them to decide how to best support their lives. We are honored and privileged to announce 63 thinkers and makers, who represent communities across 23 states and Puerto Rico, span every career stage and illuminate a breadth of artistic practices.
After another year of challenges brought on by the pandemic, artists continue uplifting those around them and investing in their communities. The 2022 USA Fellows were selected for their remarkable artistic vision and their commitment to community – both within their specific regions and discipline at large.
These generative practitioners create objects, movements, narratives, spaces, and contexts that move our culture forward. Some are social sculptors and working within and for a community is essential to their process. They are driven by the belief that shaping a better world is first and foremost a group effort. Others are material vanguards, developing bodies of work that honor their personal histories through material and technical exploration. They transform the unconventional, overlooked, and mundane to build new worlds. And many are creative disruptors, those who work across mediums and genres to challenge established systems and norms, staying committed to their practices by resisting self-doubt and embracing play. All of these artists practice across these ways of working – unbound in their thinking and unbound by the status quo.
This award was generously supported by MacKenzie Scott and Dan Jewett.
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Peter Williams (1952–2021) was a chronicler of current and historical events, interspersing pictorial narratives with personal anecdotes and fictional characters to create colorful paintings about the diverse experiences of Black Americans. With boldness and humor, Williams tackled even the darkest of subjects, including but not limited to police brutality, lynching, slavery, mass incarceration, and other realms of racial oppression. He used cultural criticism to form new creation myths, retelling the history of America from fresh and cosmic perspectives. He was recently retired from his position as senior professor in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Delaware and had previously taught for seventeen years at Wayne State University.
Born in Nyack, New York, Williams earned his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and his BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He was the recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, the Artists’ Legacy Foundation’s 2020 Artist Award and, in 2018, was inducted into the National Academy of Design. He was also recognized with numerous other awards, including a Djerassi artist residency (2018), Joan Mitchell awards (2004, 2007), Ford Foundation fellowships (1985, 1987), and a McKnight Foundation fellowship (1983).
Williams’ paintings are held in the permanent collections of many major institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Delaware Art Museum.