Untitled (Word, Sport, Administration) by Peter Beresford WIlliams

Provenance:
Private Collection, Ontario

Literature:
“Peter Williams Beresford, 69, Dies; His Art Evoked Black Lives, Including His,” The New York Times, September 18, 2021 [online publication]

Peter Williams started painting and exhibiting as a teenager, having his first solo show at the age of seventeen. He created a body of work that was broad: moving from abstract, to figurative, to more political subjects that dealt with current events, where his bold, disturbing sometimes, humorous subject matter caused controversy.

The central figure in yellow and red, with the American flag as a cape is a depiction of the superhero, N-Word, that appears in a group of the artist’s paintings created between 2015-2017. Writing in the New York Times shortly after the artist’s death, Neil Genzlinger quotes a Michigan Radio interview which the artist gave in 2016 describing how this figure came into being: “I kind of relate him to the Black exploitation films of the ‘70s... Usually the hero of some of those films was a lowlife or a pimp or somebody who wasn’t quite so respected, but in the end he came through for his community.”