Amanda Williams’s “You once told me you wanted to live somewhere where there are more than 4 or 5 ways to be black” is one of the many pieces on display at Spelman College Museum of Fine Arts. Photo courtesy of Amanda Williams, Rhona Hoffman Gallery and Casey Kaplan, New York.
In unprecedented times, marginalized voices can often find themselves worn into silence. However, artists such as Amanda Williams continue to bolster the conversation around what it means to be Black in America.
“We Say What Black This Is” is an impassioned inquest into Black identity. The collection hung alongside those of other Black artists at Spelman College Museum of Fine Arts, with Williams’s works standing defiant against the gallery’s white walls.
The exhibition is an exploration of Black identity through color theory. Williams’s inspiration rose from the online protest Blackout Tuesday — the 2020 online action against racism and police brutality in which users posted a black square image — which was widely criticized as a form of virtue signaling. The collection subverts the static nature of the black squares, each divulging a different facet of the Black experience. MacArthur-awarded artist Amanda Williams has once again deftly blurred the lines between spatiality, race and identity.
Through the AUC Art Collective, Spelman students took a special topics course on Amanda Williams. They then wrote didactic labels for the “We Say What Black This Is” collection to be displayed alongside the pieces. Art History major Chloë Catrow wrote the label for the piece titled “You refuse to stop saying ‘irregardless’ despite knowing that it is in fact NOT a word.”
When explaining the piece, she said, “It made me think about [the] dialect within the African American community, like African American Vernacular English. And I learned more about that, which I explain in the label, and tie it into how Black people have not and still can’t exist under oppression this way. Certain language is a rejection of oppressive systems. It’s a way of survival.”
The canvases are all in the square shape of an Instagram photo and utilize large swaths of black with color peeking through. The hues below the surface are as much an inquiry into Blackness as color theory, divulging an identity that goes beyond skin color. The titles of each of the pieces describe various Black experiences: health, religion, dialect and inequality, emphasizing the diversity and expansiveness of Black identity. Collectively, the works embrace different elements of Blackness and act to subvert stereotypes. Catrow stated, “I hope that [visitors] know that Blackness is not a monolith; there’s no one way to be Black. These works are a rejection of stereotypes that may have been formed about Black people. I think it’s really unique how the artist uses color to identify that.”
Amanda Williams’s contributions continue into her efforts to connect and inspire local communities. Her dedication to uplifting Black women glistened through her words: “Really for me, it was all the students. There is nowhere else on this earth that Black women get to say what anything is, and so Spelman is where this work had to be. They are the changemakers, not only in the arts but in the world.”
As Williams stated during her speech, “[Her works] are about bringing different constituencies together to really understand how we can move them collectively. We need that message more than ever right now.”