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Douglas R. Williams

Known for his tenacious championing of Black art and community in Chicago, Douglas R. Williams (1938-2019) was born in Houston, Texas and moved to Chicago in his teens with his older sister. He attended Hyde Park High School and took Saturday sculpting classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received the Raymond Fund Golden Key Award for sculpture. After returning from a deployment in the US Army, Williams returned to Chicago to complete his degree requirements at SAIC and devote his creative practice to community-centered work rooted in civil rights and the Black Arts Movement. His contributions to the Black creative scene in Chicago are numerous.  He served as the director of the South Side Community Art Center, co-founded the Black Creativity (formerly called Black Esthetics) exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry, co-owned a social performing arts club called Brief Reflections, and organized countless exhibitions. He also served as an Art Specialist for Model Cities/Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity; taught the Art Workshop at the Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. Urban Progress Center and at the Englewood Urban Progress Center; and directed On the Beach, a summer arts program at the 63rd Street Beach. Williams frequently reinvented found materials in his sculptures. In his later years, he created a series of traditional African masks constructed from plastic milk and detergent bottles.

 

 

 

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MIXED MEDIA AND STILL LIFE

Works in EMERGENCE are diverse in their subject matter and media, but a few themes reappear throughout. Working in abstraction or in the traditionally peaceful genre of still life, artists like William Carter, Allen Stringfellow, and Jonathan Green express themes of interiority or sociability, history or modernity. Notably, Stringfellow and Ralph Arnold both experimented with media and materials and worked extensively in collage, which allowed them to combine abstract design, figurative imagery, and on occasion political ideas.

Viewers typically expect Black artists to focus on particular aspects of their social and political identities within their work. Where might those expectations come from? Still life, abstraction, and collage may express many different things about artists’ interior lives and their visual and social observation, whether connected to public manifestations of identity or not.

William Carter’s mid-century still life Untitled presents a group of vibrantly colored bottles that invite the viewer’s gaze, set against a similarly colorful background with floral elements like grapes and leaves. They give evidence of conviviality and might be interpreted as symbols of social gatherings, but they could also just be a collection of pleasing forms. We might put Carter’s still life in dialogue with that of Jonathan Green, who became close friends with Carter while living in Chicago. Green’s close-up view of an eloquently simple composition presents oranges, a pear, and a lemon in front of two vessels. Works like this piece call the viewer to examine the objects the artist chose to include, to consider how they interact with each other like bodies in space, and to reflect on their meaning within the traditional genre of still life painting.

Collage might suggest the piecing together of identity from different components that might not usually coexist, giving room for more expansive imaginations of meaning than a straightforward representational image might allow. It could also just be an inventive way of combining colors, shapes, and textures. Allen Stringfellow’s Untitled, a collage from 1962, brings familiar motifs from still life—fruit and flowers, desserts and glassware—together with imagery of artist’s models and performers. Layered with paint and tissue paper that frustrate the viewer’s attempt to get clarity on the subject matter, the bursts of form and colors hint at the splashy abstraction of Stringfellow’s untitled, textured painting made from house paint and particulate on cardboard. Here the artist tests commonly found materials to create new textures and plays with the creation of colors and finishes that diverge from “Western” academic painting methods.

In The Waiting, Arnold constructs a large collage from different paper components, lace, and paint. In the piece, elements of European and African art are placed in dialogue with one another, while some figures appear alone and isolated, others in large groups. Without giving easy answers, Arnold implies questions about social issues. Who is waiting, and for what? In his Love Sign II, which bears the words “Love is Universal,” Arnold asserts the equal validity of all types of romantic affection and love, utilizing collage to convey a more straightforward political message.