A Call and Response

Peter Williams, 21st Black Spaceship, 2019. Watercolor. Photos courtesy Keisha Williams.

 

In an untitled self-portrait, painter and activist Peter Williams stares wide-eyed and unblinking, his face streaked with white liquid. From his chest, a glimmering vortex resembles a universe breaking open like a cosmic wound. Teeth, lightbulbs, fields of red and orange swirl around him, his hands reach outward.

The white on his face refers to a DNA test that revealed traces of whiteness in his ancestry, a discovery that troubled him and threaded through his paintings. 

Peter Williams, untitled. 

 

This is how I meet Williams for the first time, his being melting into the history of his own bloodline and wrestling with the Black and white within him. 

Nearly four years after Williams’ death, his Afro-surrealist visions of a fractured America have returned to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design — the school where he first trained in the 1970s — for the Homegoing exhibition. 

Five large-scale paintings and six of his smaller works are placed in dialogue with 16 local contemporary artists across three sections of the gallery, exploring his life's work, legacy, and freedom in the Black community.  

Curated by Keisha Williams, the three sections are thematically divided: “The Colorful Hard Truth” carries forward stories of slavery, Black survival, and ancestral memory; “Speak Up, Document and Leave a Record” explores violence and police brutality today; and “Ascendance” shifts to a utopian imagination centered on Black liberation.

Through the veil

The artists alongside Williams extend his explorations of Black identity and memory in different media, each confronting history, selfhood, and survival in their own way.

Following Williams’ self-portrait, artist Candice Davis’ display of pre-Civil War garments are stained with her own blood as she confronts the enduring legacy of slavery and the 19th-century cotton industry. Nearby, Jovan C. Speller’s archival photographs of land reflect how slavery severed our sense of home, belonging, and family inheritance. 

Across the gallery, Ta-coumba T. Aiken’s acrylic abstractions — Descendent of Giants, Somewhere is Knowhere, and Incognegrito — are unsettling in their own right. Dense layers of tangled orange, blue, and yellow wind through each canvas in movements that refuse resolution, a turbulence that feels both external and internal. 

 

Ta-coumba Aiken, Descendent of Giants. Photo courtesy Tom Dunn.

Within the context of this show, Aiken’s paintings seem to mirror the dissonance of thought itself — fragmented, noisy, impossible to pin down — while also reaching toward an ancestral pulse beneath the chaos. His work explores what might emerge if we truly listened to our ancestors — what shapes and colors might spill out of us. I found myself moving past them more quickly than the other works, as though lingering too long might mean confronting my own quiet resistance to listening. 

Upstairs, Nia-Symonne Gayle’s installation, The Veil, gives form to what writer and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois called “double consciousness”: The internal conflict within Black Americans who see themselves both through their own eyes and through the gaze of a society that has historically oppressed them and denied their full humanity.

“For this body of work, I was inspired to lean into a more disturbing exploration of the realities of being Black in America, something Peter [Williams] often referenced in his work,” Gayle says.

 

The Veil, Nia-Symonne Gayle.

 

In her self-portraits, Gayle appears with two heads, one shadowing the other beneath a white sheet. On the wall nearby, a projection shows her wrapping the sheet around her face again and again, a ritual of both concealment and survival. Layered over these images are reels of cartoon minstrels and white actors in blackface. The effect is jarring: the intimate struggle for selfhood pressed up against the public mockery of Blackness. 

Gayle grounds her work in Black literary tradition, drawing inspiration from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, and Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk.

“I came across Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness and his notion of the veil for the first time and finally was able to put language to something I had felt internally and subconsciously,” Gayle says. “I was asking questions like: How does America’s treatment of Black people play a role in shaping our internal identities? Where can we trace the origin of fragmented identity? How can I visually articulate having to view oneself through and constantly be aware of the eyes of the white majority?”

The Veil symbolizes the divide between how Black Americans understand themselves and how a white society insists on seeing them — a tension Gayle renders visible in her work.

“It’s through sitting with the uncomfortable and journeying back to the origins that we are able not only to return to a true sense of self, but we can experience transcendence,” Gayle says. 

Keep on keeping on

One of the most piercing truths of living in the shadow of racial violence is how easily we come to see ourselves as the distorted image others create. For centuries, institutions of white supremacy — from society at large to the media, the education system and even communities conditioned by the same gaze — have dictated what Blackness should look and feel like. Those narratives press so heavily that, over time, they begin to shape self-perception. The veil, if left unexamined, hardens into the face itself — unless it is named and resisted. 

Author and civil rights activist James Baldwin, whose books Williams returned to often, described the same condition.

“I had buried myself beneath a whole fantastic image of myself which wasn’t mine but white people’s image of me,” he said in a 1961 interview. 

Peter Williams, Jesus Died for Somebodies Sins, But Not Mine

The exhibit’s final section, “Ascendance,” imagines what it means to break through that imposed image. Williams’ 2019 watercolor painting 21st Black Spaceship envisions Black people leaving Earth in search of freedom on another planet, while his monumental 2020 canvas Jesus Died for Somebodies Sins, But Not Mine, depicts George Floyd surrounded by a chorus of angels as he ascends beyond earth.

Leslie Barlow’s 2025 portrait, Heavenly, portrays a Black woman with a third eye, while her 2022 work, my cuz, considering the sky, transforms a bedroom wall into an open horizon. The whole world unfolds behind a young girl curled up with a book. 

 

Leslie Barlow, Heavenly 

In The N-Word, a monograph of Williams’ work, he recalls a conversation with Bill Harris that, as a college student, he wrote to Baldwin seeking guidance. Baldwin’s reply was brief, but sustaining: “Keep on keeping on.”

By the time the show reaches its end, that phrase rises like a refrain — a call for Black artists to continue carrying ancestral memory, confronting the veil and imagining new worlds. Williams’ Homegoing is a reminder to claim joy as a radical act of freedom. ◼︎ 

Peter Williams: Homegoing – A Call and Response, is on view at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design Gallery through November 1.