Amanda Williams: What black is this you say?
Friday, Nov 6 – Dec 19, 20201711 W. Chicago Ave.
Chicago, IL 60622
In What black is this you say?, over 40 new watercolor, oil and mixed media paintings interrogate the complexities, variations and degrees of difference in black as color and identity.
What black is this you say? is a multi-platform color project conceived June 2, 2020, otherwise known as Blackout Tuesday. Williams posted a different “black” to her personal Instagram each day, using the ubiquity of the platform to imagine black as nuanced and highly variable, and reject black as monolithic.
Williams returns to her first love of painting to translate this body of work from digital gesture into a physical exploration of black abstraction. A deep range of purples, browns and greens are mixed to transpose what she calls the "sensation of blackness.” No pre-made black paints were used.
Similar to her breakout painted house series Color(ed) Theory, this chromatic and cultural exploration of blackness is both universal and biographical. The viewer is invited on a simultaneous adventure in soul and color, to explore the multitude of ‘Black.’