Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce its exclusive representation of the Estate of Peter Williams (1952–2021) with a solo exhibition of his paintings.

Opening on October 28, Peter Williams: Nyack spans an approximately twenty-year period from the 1990s until his passing in 2021. This is the first posthumous presentation of the artist’s output. His work exists in the space between seductive beauty and abject horror—evoking the complex experiences of Black Americans in the contemporary age. On view through December 23, Peter Williams: Nyack showcases his critical place in the canon as a painter unafraid to tackle the most challenging personal and political subjects through a host of aesthetic approaches.

The artist was born and raised in Nyack, New York. Williams described that Hudson River Village as a place of relative racial diversity. Williams more fully grasped the struggles that Black Americans face after living in other parts of the country (Minneapolis, New Mexico, and Detroit among them). His childhood in Nyack was nevertheless complicated; his work reflects themes of verbal abuse and dysfunctional family life. The painter’s vision of his hometown became even more nuanced as he researched its history. Nyack was known as a landmark on the Underground Railroad—yet in the eighteenth century, nearly half of the wealthy families in town owned enslaved people. Nyack is also the title of a major 2013 diptych that Williams based on John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778). Copley portrayed a shark dragging a young white figure, Brook Watson, underwater. Watson would later become the Lord Mayor of London and would infamously defend the slave trade in the West Indies. In his own iteration, Williams replaced Watson with a swimming Black body with missing limbs—perhaps representing the artist himself, whose right leg was amputated following a car accident in his youth. Williams often depicted characters swimming, running, or playing sports. At times, they are fantasy alter-egos who freely escape familial and societal limitations. At other times, they appear immobilized by or even drowning in such pressures. Many works, such as Hubris (2013) and Desegregation (2020), incorporate bodies of water.

About the Artist

Williams began painting as a teenager before receiving his BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

The artist was known as a passionate mentor and instructor at the University of Delaware, where he began teaching in 2004 following a seventeen-year tenure at Wayne State University. He was the recipient of the Artists’ Legacy Foundation’s 2020 Artist Award and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Recent exhibitions include Peter Williams: Black Universe, April–June 2020, Museum ofContemporary Art Detroit, MI; Peter Williams: With So Little To Be Sure Of, February–March 2018, CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY; Dark Humor: Joyce J. Scott and Peter Williams, February–April 2017, Center for the Arts Gallery, Towson University, MD; and Peter Williams: Artistic Repair, September–November 2007, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ. His work was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and the 2017 edition of Prospect New Orleans.

Williams’s paintings are found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; and the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, MA, among others.