Standing in her studio on the south side of Chicago earlier this winter, abstract painter and architect Amanda Williams was amazed at the dark blue shape filled with earthy canvas poured into paint the day before. Williams' process is precise yet fluid. She knows where the paint should hit the canvas, but surrenders to its spread. For her, the spectral figures – the body, the boring, curved body – were not just paint, but exactly what paint was made from the soil, and what happened overnight. And for Williams, this image was unshakable.
When he encountered that form, Williams said, it felt like a reminder of the spirits of the past. “It was like, my god, they're there. They're back. We've brought them back.”
That first (friendly) ghost job will be through April 26th at the Casey Kaplan Gallery in Chelsea, one of 20 new paintings and ten collages of Williams, who says “Run Together and Lose” on the current show. This is a pigment that was taken with Williams along with two materials science labs for three years to develop. Or rather, recreate it.
Blue comes from the workshop of George Washington Carver, a Tuskegee food scientist known primarily for his research on peanuts. Carver was an amateur painter who developed and patented his own pigments, including Prussian blue from Alabama's soil Black Farmers, who worked at the turn of the 20th century.
Williams first came across Carver's reference to Prussian Blue, studying the Black Inventory patent for a 2021 multimedia installation on Black Ingenuity in “Reconstruction: Architecture and Blackness in America.” “He was on one of these lists of black inventors,” recalls Williams. “In the beginning I didn't pay attention because I thought it was something with peanuts, but when I looked it up again I saw that it said blue.” In fact, Carver's 1927 patent explained how red clay soil was refined into paints and dyes.
After working on several other projects, Williams returned to patents in 2022. She said. Williams quickly realized that it was extremely difficult to realize his own ideas. “The patent is very vague. It's clear enough that Carver knows what he's doing, but it's not clear enough to follow the recipes of the cooking,” Williams also added, “I'm not a chemist.”
When renowned chemist Paul Alibisatos, president of the University of Chicago, heard Williams enthusiastically discussing Carver's recipes at a university event, he offered access to the lab to replicate the pigments. After the summer of the experiment, a group of student researchers successfully created a small batch. However, to paint, Williams had to expand production. She turned to the German company Kremer Pigments Inc., where founder Dr. Georg Kremer revised the recipe. Cremer eventually produced 100 pounds of powdered dye.
But Williams was fascinated by more than just Carver's chemistry. He also told her how bold he was. “Of the 44 bulletins Carver wrote, only one spoke about colour and beauty,” Williams said, referring to the 1911 bulletin.
Cornell-trained architect Williams has a deep understanding of colour. Her work explores the power of publicity at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum at the Venice Biennale, and at three exhibitions in Moma. Williams uses colour to envelop difficult history in expressions of joy and resilience, bringing it to a new, vibrant, politically aware view of the past.
Since her childhood, Williams has understood how space and infrastructure can determine the potential for different communities to be given. “We have the best architecture in Chicago in the world,” she said. “But that didn't inspire me.” Instead, she was drawn to the issue of inequality. “Why isn't our streets plowed? Where did the building go?”
In his 2015 project, Color (Ed) Theory, Williams coated eight homes that will be demolished in bold colors on the south side of Chicago. “I came from the south, you know, it's very black. And black people like to show off,” Williams said with a laugh. “The lights at the liquor store are neon green from the tire shop. All the colours are brighter than the colours next to them. That was my first palette.”
In 2022, Williams explored a still-engraved chapter of history on the South in “Redfining Redlining.” This was a public installation of 100,000 red tulips planted in vacant Chicago lots, tracking the previous boundaries of a discriminatory housing lending policy known as the Red Line.
“The most important and beautiful message of Amanda's work is that the past is not the past,” said Madeleine Grinzten, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA Chicago), where Williams held her first solo museum show in 2017. She added, “Amanda knows how to acknowledge and provide difficult history.”
That same year, Williams also exhibited “Candyladyblack” at Gagosian, New York. The nine saturated paintings were concentrated in a reimagining of daily dime candies (Jolie Launcher, Fruity, Sticks, Bubble Gum).
“Amanda understands colour tactically, strategically and historically,” said Michelle Kuo, MOMA's chief curator and publisher. “She uses it for visual influence, not only to map places, memories, ideas of black culture. It's really her superpower.”
When Williams discovered Carver's creative writing, she was impressed by his own desire to bring the colour of modernism to the southern landscape, in order to take the raw materials from Alabama farmland and encourage black farmers to turn them into beautiful things. “Carver was trying to show people how to make things out of what they already had,” she said. “It was very DIY and very easy, but the aspirations were beauty.”
And the fact that Carver developed a palette of modernism almost at the same time that Le Corbusier had refined himself, underscored the greater truth. For Williams, it was yet another example of how black creativity, invention, and wit is often overlooked. In that sense, Williams found scientists and unexpected creative and intelligent relatives.
In her studio, Williams experimented with Prussian blue, layered, diluted, poured paint, cracked, pooled, and bleed across the canvas. The first canvas illusion was the only perfect human form that would come true. “We tried ten times to make it happen again,” Williams recalls. “I didn't. I embraced what it was.” The rest of the resulting painting, including the title “Historical Melt, Blue Gap” and “The Blue Smell Like We Are Outside,” produced its own ghost, whether completely figurative or completely abstract. Some suggest a torso, while others suggest landscapes, rivers, and veins. “There's something anthropomorphic in this work,” Williams said. “I didn't force it. That's why it made it so powerful.”
But while ghosts may live in paint, Williams' goal is not only to resurface the past, but to expand it. “I want to make sure the piece stands on its own,” Williams said. “It's not just about carrying the luggage of history,” Williams said, and this colour is similar to “Amanda Carver Blue.”
