With 100 Pounds of Blue Pigment, an Artist Conjures Spirits of the Past

Standing in her studio on the South Side of Chicago earlier this winter, the abstract painter and architect Amanda Williams was surprised by a dark blue form that filled the earth-toned canvas, which she had poured with paint the day before. Williams’s process is precise yet fluid; she knows just where the paint should hit the canvas but surrenders to its diffusion. To her, the spectral figure — a body, hunched and bent — that manifested eerily overnight sprang not just from the paint, but from the very soil the paint was made from — Alabama iron-rich soil Williams had her cousin ship in buckets via Fed-Ex. And to Williams, the image was unshakable.

Encountering that form, Williams said, felt like conjuring spirits of the past. “It was like, Oh my God, there they are. They’re coming back. We brought them back.”

That first (amicably) haunted work is one of 20 new paintings and 10 collages that Williams presents in her current show, “Run Together and Look Ugly After the First Rain,” at Casey Kaplan Gallery in Chelsea, through April 26. The painting, “She May Well Have Invented Herself,” like all the work in the show, centers on a deep, midnight blue. It’s a pigment that took Williams, together with two material science labs, three years to develop. Or, rather, to recreate.

The blue originated in the workshop of George Washington Carver, the Tuskegee food scientist known mainly for his research on peanuts. Carver was an amateur painter who developed and patented his own pigments, including a Prussian blue, from the Alabama soil Black farmers worked at the turn of the 20th century.

Williams first came across a reference to Carver’s Prussian blue while researching Black inventors’ patents for her 2021 multimedia installation on Black ingenuity in “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,” a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. “He was on one of these lists of Black inventors,” Williams recalled. “At first I didn’t pay attention because I thought it would be something with peanuts, but when I looked again, I saw it said blue.” In fact, Carver’s 1927 patent described refining red clay soil into paint and dye.

After working on several other projects, Williams returned to the patent in 2022. “It all started with a simple, innocent question: what would it take to recreate Carver’s blue?” she said. Williams quickly realized that bringing the idea to life on her own would be exceedingly difficult. “The patent is extremely vague. It’s just clear enough so you know Carver knows what he’s doing, but not clear enough to follow a cooking recipe.” Also, Williams added, “I’m not a chemist.”

When the University of Chicago’s president, Paul Alivisatos, a distinguished chemist, overheard Williams enthusiastically discussing Carver’s recipe at a university event, he offered her access to his laboratory to help recreate the pigment. After a summer of experimentation, a group of student researchers successfully produced a small batch. To paint, however, Williams needed to scale production. She turned to the German company Kremer Pigments Inc., where its founder, Dr. Georg Kremer, modified the recipe. Kremer ultimately produced 100 pounds of powder pigment, only small amounts of which are needed to make a gallon of paint.

But Williams was fascinated by more than just Carver’s chemistry. His boldness also spoke to her. “Of 44 bulletins that Carver wrote, only one talked about color and beauty,” Williams said, referring to a bulletin from 1911. “I can’t imagine the audacity to be thinking about beauty at a time when so many just had to survive.”

Williams, a Cornell-trained architect, has a deep understanding of color. Her work, which she’s shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, at the Venice Biennale and in three exhibitions at MoMA, explores the propagandistic power of color. Williams uses color to alchemize fraught histories into expressions of joy and resilience, bringing the past into a new, vibrant and politically aware view.

Since childhood, Williams has understood how space and infrastructure dictate the possibilities afforded to different communities. “We have the best architecture in the world in Chicago,” she said. “But that’s not what inspired me.” Instead, she was drawn to the questions of inequity. “I was asking, how come our streets don’t get plowed? Where did that building go?”

For her 2015 project “Color(ed) Theory,” Williams coated eight homes scheduled for demolition on Chicago’s South Side in bold colors — “Currency Exchange yellow,” “Flamin’ Hot orange,” “Crown Royal purple” — referring to consumer products associated with Black life in America. “I come from the South Side, you know, very Black. And Black people like to show out,” Williams said, laughing. “Liquor store lights blaring, the tire shop neon green. Every color is brighter than the one next to it. That was my first palette.”

In 2022, Williams explored a still fraught chapter of South Side history in “Redefining Redlining,” a public installation of 100,000 red tulips planted across vacant Chicago lots, tracing the former boundaries of discriminatory home lending policies known as redlining.

“The most important and beautiful message of Amanda’s works is that the past is not past,” said Madeleine Grynsztejn, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA Chicago), where Williams staged her first solo museum show in 2017. “It’s still very much with us — particularly the American history of racism, the American history of disinvestment in communities, and the hope for the restoration of community.” She added, “Amanda knows how to both acknowledge and offer an olive branch to a difficult history.”

That same year, Williams also exhibited “CandyLadyBlack” at Gagosian in New York, a series that paid homage to Black women who sell candy and small goods from their homes and on the streets. The nine saturated paintings reimagined everyday dime candy — Jolly Ranchers, Frooties, Stix, and bubble gum — into incandescent works so vibrant they nearly glowed with phosphorescence.

“Amanda understands color tactically, strategically, and historically,” said Michelle Kuo, the chief curator at large and publisher at MoMA. “She’s not just using it for its visual impact, but to map out ideas of place, memory and Black culture. That really is her superpower.”

When Williams found Carver’s creative writings, she was struck by his own desire to bring Modernist color to the Southern landscape, to take the raw materials of Alabama farmland and encourage Black farmers to turn them into something beautiful. “Carver was just trying to show people how to make things from what they already had,” she said. “It was very D.I.Y., very straightforward, but the aspiration was beauty.”

And the fact that Carver developed a Modernist palette around the same time Le Corbusier was refining his own, underscored a larger truth: whose innovations are celebrated and whose forgotten? For Williams, it was yet another example of how Black creativity, invention, and resourcefulness are often overlooked. In that sense, Williams found an unexpected creative and intellectual kinship with the scientist.

In her studio, Williams experimented with her Prussian blue, layering, diluting and pouring the paint, letting it crack, pool and bleed across the canvas. The apparition on the first canvas was the only full human form to materialize. “We tried like ten times to make it happen again,” Williams recalled. “It didn’t. I just accepted what it was.” The rest of the resulting paintings — such as the evocatively titled “Historical Elisions, Gap for Blue” and “Blue Smells Like We Been Outside” — produced their own ghosts, neither fully figurative nor entirely abstract. Some suggest torsos, while others allude to landscapes, rivers, or veins. “There is something anthropomorphic about this work,” Williams said. “I didn’t force it. That’s what made it powerful.”

But while the ghosts may live in the paint, Williams’s goal is not just to resurface the past, but to expand it. “I want to make sure that the work just stands on its own,” Williams said. “It doesn’t have to just carry the baggage of history.” This color, Williams added, is something closer to “Amanda Carver blue.”