Art

The painter Peter Williams received the Artists’ Legacy Foundation’s 2020 Artist Award.

Justin Kamp
Sep 15, 2020 9:10PM, via Artists' Legacy Foundation
Peter Williams
Blue Flowers, 2020
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

The Artists’ Legacy Foundation named Peter Williams as the recipient of its 2020 Artist Award, which grants $25,000 to a “painter or sculptor who has made significant contributions to their field and whose work shows evidence of the hand,” according to a press release.

Over the course of more than forty years, Williams’s painting practice has reflected on racism, police brutality, incarceration, and environmentalism, often through a vivid, figurative lens. His recent work incorporates Afro-futurist visuals and narratives, focusing on invented superheroes and space-bound colonists.

Williams said in a statement:

I am deeply honored to be a recipient of this distinguished award…[It is] the validation of 40 years of work, representing People of Color in my art…y interest in Black culture stretches back to Africa and its culture, to Afro-futurism in my latest body of work.

Williams was chosen by a jury panel consisting of Eve Aschheim, artist and professor at Princeton University; Dennis Elliott, artist and founder of the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York; and Valerie Cassel Oliver, curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. In addition to the grant, Williams will participate in a conversation with Jordana Moore Saggese, associate professor of American art at the University of Maryland, which will stream online on October 22nd.

Past winners of the prize include Howardena Pindell, Nancy Chunn, Jim Nutt, and Peter Saul.

Justin Kamp