Peter Williams featured in exhibition at Satchel Projects

In “Notes of a Painter,” Henri Matisse dreamed of an art of “purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter… something like a good armchair which provides relaxation” for a businessman or a “man of letters.”

This is not that show.

Satchel Projects is pleased to present AUTHORITY PROBLEM, a group exhibition that explores notions of authority – from its meaning as “expertise” and legitimate institutional authority, to abuses of power and the role of protest in the face of the current global turn toward authoritarianism.

Artists in the exhibition include Kris Chatterson, James Esber, Jane Fine, David Humphrey, Clare Kambhu, Karmimadeebora McMillan, Mira Schor, and Peter Williams.

Peter Williams’s epic painting Detroit News takes its title from the one of two major newspapers published in Detroit, where Williams lived during the 1980s and 90s. The News was a politically right-leaning paper in a city characterized by extreme racial inequality, unemployment, and a history of racial uprising. 

Created in 2019, Detroit News is structured on a central image framed by four vignetted narrative scenes. In the center of the painting, a smiling figure approaches a lit doorway at dusk, blissfully unaware he is being tailed by a car with a pig at the wheel. The pig-driver is drawn in pencil, empty and ephemeral, a negative shape. In contrast to the solidly painted central image, Williams used paint marker for the surrounding scenes, employing a mosaic-like Divisionist style. The shifting orientation of the four exterior “framing” panels creates the sensation that they are rotating on the axis of the central image, like a wheel, a process endlessly turning (notably, the city itself has a “hub and spoke” layout). The imagery in these surrounding vignettes contrasts text-based racial epithets with images of flying cars, alluding to both the Motor City and Afrofuturism, a cosmic escape to a place without baggage -- a new frontier.