An installation shot of Nightshade: The World in the Evening, at Oakland University Art Gallery through March 30,  2025. All photos courtesy of OUAG except where noted.

Nightshade: The World in the Evening at the Oakland University Art Gallery explores the shadowed world as light declines to dark. It’s a liminal space – not quite here, not quite there — that ushers us into the absorbing night and the “emergence of otherworldliness,” as the introductory panel tells us on entering the gallery. This group show of 18 international contemporary painters will be up through March 30.

Gallery director Dick Goody says he wanted to touch on the ways in which twilight and darkness are spiritually and emotionally different from daylight. “If you’re working during the day, at 11 a.m., you’re not going to start thinking about metaphysics and existence,” he says. “You do that at night. So I introduced nighttime to the gallery as a way to reflect and connect to yourself.”

Sean Landers, Wildfire (Mendocino National Forest), Oil on linen, 2022.

One of the delights of Nightshade is the broad range of painters and painting styles Goody has assembled, ranging from highly realistic to the marvelously simplified or distorted. Probably the most realistic canvas, and certainly the most depressing, is New Yorker Sean Landers’ Wildfire (Mendocino National Forest), a panorama of incineration roaring on both sides of a highway, a thoroughly freaked deer frozen in the middle of the road. Indeed, both Wildfire and the next work below, Willy Lott’s House by Ulf Puder, seem to gesture towards a darker, more metaphorical twilight than just the routine passage from day to night

Landers’ canvas packs special punch right now, just after the Los Angeles fires were mostly contained. But the painting touches on the gloomy, more-disturbing twilight we’re entering, whether we know it or not – the dimming of the mostly generous world humanity has known, give or take, for 10,000-plus years, and its possible replacement by the far more hostile realm of fire and flood.

Ulf Puder, Willy Lott’s House, Oil on canvas, 2022.

Hewing more closely to the show’s focus on the literal shift from day to night is German artist Ulf Puder’s Willy Lott’s House, a much simplified and abstracted portrait of a house with a wrap-around porch under glowering gray twilight. The sky and trees feel vaguely menacing, as does the rowboat and apparent debris pushed up right against the porch. Horizontal reflections running up to the house all around suggest flooding. Somewhat at odds with this downbeat possibility, however, are large blocks of color on the wall running along the porch, which form a small, sublime composition in themselves. Goody calls Puder “a painter’s painter — he really reduces things to simple brush strokes,” resulting in works that Goody characterizes as “austerely elegant.”

Danielle Roberts, Tomb of a Time, Acrylic on canvas, 2024

The previous two works are each essentially landscapes. For something completely different, spend a few minutes in front of New York artist Danielle Roberts’ Tomb of a Time, a glimpse through large windows of a party of young people.  Goody notes the voyeuristic quality of the composition – we’re peering in at the party-goers, all of whom are blissfully unaware, cans of beer in hand, that they’re being studied. Adds Goody, “and nobody’s meeting our gaze.” Color-wise, this canvas is almost German Expressionist in its lavish use of aqua and purple-pink on faces and bare arms. The last thing to say about this gathering is that nobody appears to be having a good time. There’s a somber, hip pall hanging over everything that runs against the very notion of party – though, truth be told, we’ve all probably been there.

 Goody is bullish on Roberts’ future:  “You’re going to hear a lot more about her.

Marcus Jahmal, Illuminated, Oil on canvas, 2023.

 And now for something completely absurd – take Marcus Jahmal’s Illuminated, an almost cartoon-like juxtaposition of odd elements: a woman’s leg stuck straight out, horizontal to the floor; a black cat about to hiss; a chandelier and a colorful grandfather clock. Goody suggests that the leg belongs to a Halloween witch, an interpretation that fits well with the black cat who’s arching its back menacingly.

 Jahmal, who lives in Brooklyn and is entirely self-taught, also pulls off another nice color study in rectangles of black, mustard and violet that set off the composition’s four elements – leg, cat, chandelier and clock — very nicely. “It’s such a simple painting, but evocative of something a bit like Matisse, with his simplified, reductive forms,” says Goody, adding, “and a little bit of slapstick.”

Hein Koh, The Dark Sea (detail), Oil on canvas, 2024. Photo by Detroit Art Review.

Hein Koh, also Brooklyn-based, gives us the only black-and-white work in Nightshade, as well as the most abstract and geometric. The Dark Sea stars a small, prone figure confronted by the rushing sea. “Koh’s work,” says Goody, “is usually one person or character facing some sort of ordeal,” which would fit this. Constructed in parallel or concentric wavy brush strokes a bit like dark-grey icing, The Dark Sea is a pleasurably mesmerizing visual experience. There’s a rhythm to Koh’s lines. The canvas almost seems to vibrate.

 One of the smaller paintings, The Dark Sea is the last in the exhibition, at least if you walk the gallery in the most-obvious way. “It’s not very big, and I think it’s a nice coda for the show,” Goody says, and in that he’s correct. The work is surprising and engaging, and an astringent contrast to all the color that preceded it.

Anna Kenneally, Nocturnal 1, Oil on canvas, 2022.

 Nightshade: The World in the Evening will be at the Oakland University Art Gallery until March 30, 2025.

Peter Williams, Installation, David Klein Gallery Detroit, Nov. 2-December 21, photo courtesy of David Klein Gallery

As I entered the David Klein Gallery in Detroit this December, the intense face of an African American man confronted me from the middle distance of an enormous painting.  Cathedral, by Peter Williams, from the artist’s series “Bent Word,” is now on view along with a dozen of his late masterpieces until December 21. Executed near the time of his death in 2021, the composition is crowded with lively figures, exuberant patterns, and minivans traveling inexplicably through outer space. The enigmatic central figure (possibly Williams himself?) dressed in astronaut’s gear (or are they pajamas?) floats, weightless, in a topsy-turvy environment. Silent behind his helmet, is he waving hello? Or goodbye? Or both?  The brilliant white areas of primed canvas recurring throughout the composition create the impression that the painting is starting to shatter into brilliantly colored pieces.

Peter Williams, Cathedral, 2019, oil and graphite on canvas, 72” x 96” All photos by K.A. Letts unless otherwise noted.

Williams’s artworks throughout the exhibition are full of references to pop culture yet grounded in the artist’s deep understanding of Western art history.  He created his own unique style by mixing pop culture imagery, geometric abstraction, pointillism, and pattern painting with his studies of Goya, Kandinsky, and Klee. Robert Colescott’s paintings, with figures from art history like St. Sebastian and Picasso’s demoiselles bumping up against pinup girls and Aunt Jemima, also come to mind. In a 2020 interview with the Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Williams explained, “Most people don’t have any kind of dialogue with the work of 500 years ago or even 100 years ago. I’m trying to talk in the language that’s available to most people. We live in a comic universe right now.”

Peter Williams, 2. As the Birds Fly, Another Planet, 2019, oil and graphite on canvas, 72” x 96”

Afrofuturist narratives make up an important part of Williams’s cosmology, particularly in the later paintings. The “Bent Word” series tells stories of imaginary African American colonists (and a character called “the N Word”) who depart earth, escaping  environmental catastrophe. In his 2019 painting As the Birds Fly, Another Planet, Williams imagines a new world, strange yet attractively pastoral, where earth’s birds join aliens in paradisical leisure. A lone Black basketball player at the upper edge of the painting seems headed for the planet’s surface.

Peter Williams, Leon Spinks’ Salvation, 2020-2021, oil on canvas, 60” x 72”

Mortality was clearly on Williams’s mind when he painted Leon Spinks’ Salvation in 2020-2021. The world -famous boxer died in February 2021 after a long illness, only a few months before Williams was to follow him. The central, haloed figure  in celestial blue seems headed upward, with crosses that might be stars anchoring the astral space. Two white vans (ambulances?) with discarded body parts float, left and right, over the blue planet below. An appalled astronaut mouthing the words “holy shit” expresses, perhaps, the stunned reaction we all share when contemplating mortality. The colorful but thinly painted imagery suggests, once again, the conditional quality of fugitive human existence. A smaller canvas on a similar theme, Leon Spinks’s Taxi, is devoid of figures, focusing instead on cosmic cars leaving earth’s gravity.

Peter Williams, Leon Spinks’s Taxi, 2021, oil on canvas, 31” x 40

NYACK, painted in 2013, makes a helpful comparison to the later work. The comic figures are arranged in a kind of rightward-facing parade, earthbound. The organizing compositional elements are vertical. But a brown figure moves right to left below, missing limbs but still swimming resolutely through the water.

Peter Williams, NYACK, 2013, oil on canvas, 60” x 132” (diptych)

Williams died in Wilmington, Delaware on August 19, 2021. He had recently retired as a senior professor in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Delaware. But before that, he had been an associate professor for 17 years at  Detroit’s Wayne State University. Detroit-based Rotland Press published a monograph in 2016 entitled “The N-Word: Paintings by Peter Williams,” which included an interview between Williams and Detroit poet and playwright Bill Harris. A major exhibition of Williams’s work, “Black Exodus,” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in January of 2021, only a few months before his death, and featured a few of the paintings now on display at David Klein Gallery.

Peter Williams, Peter and Mike, 2019, oil and graphite on canvas, 60” x 48”

Born in Suffern, N.Y. in 1952, Williams grew up in Nyack, N.Y., where he had his first solo exhibition at the age of 17. He earned a B.F.A. from  Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1975, followed by an M.F.A. from Maryland Institute (College of Fine Art) in 1987. A life-altering car accident while Williams was in New Mexico as a young man resulted in lifelong disability. He lost his right leg and required crutches for the rest of his life.

Peter Williams’s paintings are housed in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. In 2020, he received the Artists’ Legacy Foundation Award, followed a few months later with a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Williams’s paintings defy categorization as they settle into their place in contemporary art history. They are funny, wild, sometimes terrifying, but always deeply human, combining abstraction, figuration, storytelling and racial advocacy in a persuasive worldview that takes into account not only the world as it is, but our future as it could become.

Peter Williams @ David Klein Gallery, November 2-December 21, 2024