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ArtistOnTheCuttingEdge:  Tell AOTCE about yourself  and your journey into the visual arts?  Was it something that you always knew you would do?

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PETER WILLIAMS: I started making art very young, showing my work at black owned galleries, street fairs and temples with Black and Jewish support.   I was probably 14.  It was something I always did and didn't think about it so much.  But I grew up in an artsy community, Nyack New York.  So, it was always around me in some form or another.  I had great support too from the white community and showed in a gallery in Nyack while I was in high school.  I sold lots of art work. My family was not indifferent but had a difficult time with my success, though I suspect they felt some pride. It's like coming home and speaking a different language, they did not always seem to know what to make of it.

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AOTCE: Can you share your educational background and what you are currently doing?

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PW: I went to college in Albuquerque New Mexico 1970-72 my first two years and got my BFA in Minnesota at Minneapolis College of Art and Design 1975 {after a terrible car accident in New Mexico} .  I also received my Masters degree from Baltimore's,  Maryland Institute College of Art 1987.  I am currently a full professor teaching at the University of Delaware since 2004 and spend as much time in the studio as I can to promote my work and to advance my teaching.

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AOTCE: Usually people see the world differently after and encounter with life altering events.  Can you tell me how the accident impacted your work?

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PW: I was 20 when my roommate drove us off a cliff outside of Albuquerque in the Sandia Mountains.  I lost a leg and suffered many other breaks, lacerations, a massive hematoma, blindness etc .  I spent seven months in a hospital.  My roommate lived and broke his jaw.  I suppose the big impact was psychological as well as physical.  I had felt a sense of possibility before the accident and was just beginning to explore more conceptual ideas but my work was still grounded in a Black experience. I made representational work about Black cowboys, rustlers, settlers etc.  Afterward in Minneapolis, Minnesota I was schooled in the conceptual parts and I think I lost some of my identity.  I made images and explored object making but the center did not hold and it took me many years to get my "black to a negritude" in the work.

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AOTCE: I like the turn of the phrase you used "black to a negritude.  Do you think in any way you were trying to escape who your were or are?

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PW: I think it helps to explain that I was at the same time by the mid-nineteen, eighties I was having a white experience.  The art world in Minnesota was very segregated and I was making my choices.  I didn't understand what integration really meant or how difficult it was to maintain.  Whiteness for me was like a cure and a curse.  You are unaware of what it is until you are deep in it, which I am. I have no regrets, it got me to the present, I enjoyed my "white" experience.

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AOTCE:  Was it simply your environment that caused you to embrace the so called, white experience or did outside forces begin to exert their ideas of who you were and what they wanted you to be? 

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PW: I got the message while in Minneapolis that racial content was not viable from a variety of sources, social, an "otherness was not part of my education at the time".  Minneapolis is a very Northern European city.  Race was expected to be played down and not looked at.  I was in my teens in New Mexico and James Baldwin (from my reading) helped me to examine and explain my experiences.  I looked to books and essays to explain some of what I went through and I read a lot of things back then.

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AOTCE: Do you think that being of your frame of mind, living, in your words, the "white experience" has hindered or added to you in any way?

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PW: Absolutely, the loss of connectedness to my family ( I was gone so much of my adult life), the lack of an experience in a Black community.  I was at odds with many in the Black community due to their appearance that I was not owning my blackness while in Detroit  I felt I was building bridges between worlds Black and White. I spent a lot of time being a surrogate for the community I thought, in the end I think it was a very complicated exchange. Neither side seemed capable of a reasoned exchange. I felt left high and dry at times.

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AOTCE: So how does that emotion translate into your art now?

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PW: I felt that my life was my own to live as I could and should and shall.  I felt that the limited experience of many of my Black {and white} comrades, with travel, and through their segregated education created a schism and that a broader understanding of possibilities for me and thee was lost upon many.  I now see it for what it was.  I was centered and focused on my truths.  My art is coming of age.  There's a black rage I am experiencing through {age} and the history that I am researching.  A feeling that we are still caught in a slave trade of sorts by the incarceration of millions of Black men and the labor they provide.  That the dominant culture is selling us cheaply. We sell ourselves cheaply as well.  I am angry and it's manifesting itself in my work.  I no longer consider myself an artist, but a painter {its more of a reason I identify with labor} because of the politics.  I don't make paintings that are mere decorations.  My painting embody a passion for some kind of truth that I've observed and developed.

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AOTCE: Kehinde Wiley states in his recent exhibit video that "all art is political".  Do you agree?

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PW: I am not a big fan of his work but I do think that there is some truth to what he says.  The politics has always made me aware that when I engage life on a white or black planet I am taking a risk because I have never quite fit into either a white or black world.

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AOTCE: I can feel your belated rage.   I say belated because many African-Americans went through that anger stage at a very tender age.  Too young.  Some were forever changed,  strengthened and some are in denial that there is a difference.  So how were you changed?

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PW: Then and now I live on a White planet, I have no deep antipathy toward white people, my wife is Czech and my stepsons are Jewish. I am deeply in it, I teach at a White university, however I have a sense that "whiteness" is like negritude a way of being and I feel the need to explore what that relationship means to me through my art.  I'm angry because the older I get {I am now 65} the more I see what the damage is and that we are in effect a damaged people and that we live in a damaged country. White ownership has complicated our abilities to grow and develop fully.  It is not fully discussed by white people or recognized that they have to own this damage.