Amanda Williams

Run Together and Look Ugly after the First Rain at Casey Kaplan continues Amanda Williams’s exploration of color, questions about black and Blackness, and interest in the built environment while pushing her practice conceptually and materially. The exhibition takes its title from a series of instructional bulletins published by the scientist George Washington Carver about creating paints from natural ingredients found in his readers’ environments and how they could use them to develop a sense of ownership and pride of place in the places they lived.

Working with a team of scientific researchers, Williams reconstructed Carver’s patented formula for creating Prussian Blue paint from Alabaman red clay, a color she calls Innovation Blue. The show’s poured paintings (hung singly and in diptychs and triptychs), collages, and freestanding central wall all use the pigment held in different binders, which produce diverse effects and even distinctive hues. Williams has also paired Innovation Blue with the raw clay to yield a moving discourse on art, architecture, potential, loss, and, indeed, the promise of innovation. This interview has been edited from our conversation conducted in early March 2025.

Amanda Gluibizzi (Rail): What art makes you want to stop and go make your own?

Amanda Williams: Generally, it’s something where even if the aesthetic doesn’t necessarily seem like something that would connect with me, I’m very intrigued by artists’ process. When I feel like I can follow what might have been going on, that seems very exciting. When there are stretches in materiality or genuine concern for materiality, those are things that excite me and make me want to translate a way the artist might have approached something into what I’m doing. Obviously, there’s a risk factor that I think I also gravitate towards.

You know, Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance was all the discussion for so many different reasons, and the subject of so many think pieces the next day. But for me, that was also one of those moments where you feel like this is a genuine artist who’s willing to take some risk with their art form. There are many layers and ways that we can critique and love or not love, but to constantly have that level of risk and vulnerability is exciting. And I literally wanted to turn the TV off—which is funny because of the song title, “tv off”—and run to my studio, at nine o’clock at night or whatever, and just start, buzzing with ideas. Those are the factors I’ve seen as a throughline over time, about risk-taking, materiality, vulnerability. When I see that, when that seems to emanate from the work, no matter what form the work is taking, that’s what gets me excited.

Rail: I like the idea of you throwing on your best pair of boot-cuts and running to your studio just so that you can go and make things. That’s a wonderful image.

When I was writing about abstraction a lot, I listened to a lecture by an art historian who said everybody thinks that abstraction is the great unknown in art, but actually it’s color. Color is the thing that people cannot know. You’ve talked about this a lot, about relations of color, the relativity of color. You speak so vibrantly and eloquently about color. Is color difficult for you? Or do you find that it’s something that you’re able to grab and then make meaning with?

Williams: Color is incredibly intuitive to me. And it wasn’t until I was maybe ten or eleven years old when I realized, “Oh, color doesn’t work like this for everybody? I don’t understand why it doesn’t work like that for you.” It’s always been something that I’ve felt at ease about and, in fact, feel most at home with. When it comes to color as a material, like mixing paint, the excitement of being able to mix any color is like nothing else I can describe. It’s a bit of a party trick, but it’s also this interesting way that I’m constantly seeing, literally, a full spectrum. There’s a blue-green and a green-blue. That first major box of Crayolas had sixty-four colors, and I felt like they really got me when there was both blue-green and green-blue, because they’re not the same thing!

Being able to make these associations has also been fluid, and I can’t pinpoint when I fully understood that as a skill set or something that I could leverage for creative expression and making, but it was always there. I studied architecture at Cornell University, with a strong modernist tradition. The removal of color or using only the natural color of the materials as your palette was fundamental to that canon. Questioning how the full spectral range of visible color should or should not be used very quickly became for me an obvious metaphor for removing race, removing certain cultures from the discourse. So I felt a desire to take ownership of making sure that color wasn’t seen as something that’s either pedantic or so elusive that we shouldn’t deal with it. There was a lot of, “Well, draw it first in black and white” or “Make the form first and then add the color later.” There was never a moment where color was foregrounded. I can remember distinctly wondering, what if we had to add this, and not as an extra variable? Drawing isometrics is difficult, but we had to do it, to learn to do it, but this other thing—color—we should leave till last, because it’s kind of complicated, and maybe sometimes just leave it out totally, like maybe we didn’t need it. We just need the form. We don’t need color aside from neutrals. That was an interesting counter-assertion after having grown up, like most people, with the Crayola box, rainbows, Lite-Brite, urban signage, all these things were saturated colors and were part of our experience, and then to move into this academic setting where it’s like, “no, no, put those colors back on the shelf for the time being. We can come back to that.”

Rail: Thinking about the color in your show, I was interested in the variety of hues in the blue and in creating Innovation Blue, the research that went into it, and the history of that, but also the surprise of the fact that it does sometimes seem like a Prussian Blue, and sometimes it seems more subdued than Prussian Blue, and sometimes it seems more green than a Prussian Blue.

Williams: I think you hit it spot on. The obsession early on was just, “How on earth am I going to do this?” There was this wonderful, funny, hilarious ebb and flow of following breadcrumbs to get to all the components to produce the pigment. While I understood historically that there are raw pigments, that most color comes from things in nature, and that this Prussian Blue was synthetic, I only understood that on a basic level. It was not until we finally were able to produce the pigment that I understood this massive question of “What medium am I using?” I have never thought of media, aside from knowing that oil is oil paint, or acrylic is polymer-based, or watercolors use a gum-arabic binder. The range of things that this pigment can be combined with, and the chemistry behind that, did not enter my mind until we had the product. And it’s like a new baby: “Oh, my goodness, what does it want to be?” You’re kind of paralyzed initially, because I was thinking of that Prussian Blue in association with, let’s say, tubes of oil paint that I have that are indochrome, cobalt, ultramarine; the Prussian Blue is in that phthalo. I had a sense of the range of blue, and then which blues I might use to get to other colors. It never dawned on me that shifting the medium would shift that understanding. There are three binders used in tandem with the pigment to create different paints: casein, which is a milk paint, distemper, and then watercolor.

The initial idea was that I would try the DIY-making of these things to get a sense of what George Washington Carver might have been doing differently. I took a step back to try to make it myself, see what that yields, and then I went to a store-bought version just to keep it moving; I just wanted to know what the experience was like. And it was alluring, because I had made this rule for myself: I was going to be limited to this one color. I was like, “Is it gonna look like a porcelain vase? How am I going to get contrast? And value? How am I going to get all these other things that I know are necessary to be able to control creating a composition and making a painting, with just this one thing?” Then this secondary quest of considering, “What’s the full range of what I can make casein do? What’s the full range of what I can make watercolor do? What’s the full range of what I can make distemper do? There are three media and a spectrum along each three, and then what happens if I mix two?” The casein and the watercolor, and the watercolor and the distemper… it turned very quickly into this matrix of ways that they would either be symbiotic or fight each other, and I wondered if that material behavior could start to influence some of the content. That’s what I spent last summer doing, thinking deeply about that.

I have a former assistant, Jonah Hoffman, whom I’d put against any color chemist expert across all kinds of spectra. He just has an encyclopedic understanding of materiality and color and meaning, and we bonded and were able to push a lot of the limits of what was going on because he has a clear understanding of where the chemical compound breaks down or where these things start to fall apart: “We could do that, but here are the consequences.” It was great to have somebody that’s willing to jump out of the plane, but also be like, “We will pass out when we hit ten thousand feet.” Or, “Just warning you, here’s what’s gonna happen.” And oftentimes, me ignoring it and it happening and then being like, “Oh, right, okay, don’t do that again. That’s good to know.” That created the palette, and even though it’s one color, it gives you that range. The watercolor is going to skew towards those greeny-turquoise things. The casein—there’s a term in dyeing called sateen—even though the pigment can’t be a dye yet, it behaves similarly to that, so the casein will make it kind of dull. It’s almost like pushing the desaturation button on Photoshop or something. There are ways that you could do less saturation, darken the pigment load, and now all those things are in my head like a little Rolodex. At any given moment, I can pull those things up to kind of create the full composition. That was extremely exhilarating and exhausting, but it now makes me think back to all the other colors. I was so proud of myself for always mixing my own colors, never taking anything out of the tube. But now there’s that next level of pushing even the media choices within oil: What else is possible? And then what? What is that in service of, because it’s cool and interesting, but then what stories does it want to start to tell? After having kind of developed this palette that is limited, what is that in service of? What do you want to do with that information?

Rail: I want to make sure that I understand how the blue that Carver invented was made. He was attempting a native Prussian Blue using ingredients that he could get in the United States. Am I understanding correctly that he was using a red clay to yield this Prussian Blue color?

Williams: That is correct. And from what I’ve learned, having interfaced with scientists, the production of the blue is straightforward. The accidental discovery that was initially made with Prussian Blue was relatively quickly understood by the scientific community. He had access to this red clay soil in abundance at the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) that was founded by Booker T. Washington, which sits on hundreds of acres of land that Washington had purchased. It’s all over much of Alabama, the Carolinas, a lot of the southern states. Carver realized that he could get a basic ingredient necessary for a recipe for Prussian Blue from this soil. And the thinking was that, since it was here in abundance, they could monetize it and use that money to fund the research and the work that was going on at the school. That was the impetus for Prussian Blue. The potential of monetizing it was important.

Rail: It’s a way of thinking in the vernacular and the local, while also expanding the idea of properties and potentials. It reminded me very much of ways that you’ve spoken about your works in the past: When you were speaking about your series “What black is this you say?” you asked: can red be black? Here you have this actualization. Can red be blue? Can blue be green? It’s a way of furthering your own practice, both conceptually and practically.

Williams: Yes, that’s a beautiful observation. That was the surprise because the eureka moment of making it was so all-consuming that once I had it, I was like, “Oh my god, I’m gonna have a gallery full of flat blue paintings. We’ve seen that before.” It was going back to exactly what you’re saying, digging into my own throughline to say, “This is the color, but you’re always asking this other question. Now ask that question of this material, and what does it yield?” Because I hesitated to make this just “My summer project about George Washington Carver.” I wanted to pause and take that extra step to say, “What are the questions you’re always asking of color, and what could this color do or mean?” I didn’t ask it as explicitly as the way you just described it but definitely the same sort of idea. Can blue be black? Can red be blue? Can blue be green? And later, how light can I get it? How dark can I get it? How much can I do without adding white, without adding black, without adding anything else to it, even the soil? I’m not sure now why I made that a rule, but I saw the range of possible colors when adding the soil back into the pigment: what is the full potential of just this thing? Very rarely do we think of ourselves in that way, and very rarely do we think of a single thing: What are all the things sugar can do? What are all the things that your nephew can do? We rarely get to that, because we stop at either pre-judgment or good enough, you know? I never say never, but if this is the first and last time I do this, then let’s do it. And it was bringing those questions back that activated this material.

Rail: I recognize all the mediation that happens even with a stained painting, but it also seems less adulterated in a certain way because you are pouring directly on the panel.

Williams: I typically do poured paintings on wood panels, on the floor, on horizontal surfaces. But I’ve been working with oil and Galkyd—which is a Gamblin brand of alkyd—for so long I can pretty much achieve whatever sheen or viscosity that I want. That feels strong to me. There was something about allowing the color to be the owner or the progenitor that was important. That process already lends itself to having to yield to what the material wants to do, because you’ve taken away gravity in a sense. There is a moment where the spread is based on a few variables, the ability for two things to interact based on their compatibility or not: the absorption rate of the wood, if it’s hot, if it’s humid. There are things that can affect it, but for the most part, you are beholden to what it wants to do, and it requires a kind of concentration and focus to decide to be okay with that, even if it feels uncomfortable. And the feeling is usually, “I don’t like that shape, or I don’t like that thing.” I can start off knowing about the amount of surface area I want to cover, or whether I want it to feel equal or imbalanced, or just the plastics of making a composition. Those are already at play, but then you have this other dynamic variable of material itself and its level of unpredictability that guides that decision-making, and that’s just one pour, one layer. It continued to be a series of choices.

The distemper was very different from the watercolor. It was very even, and it behaved itself; it stayed where it was supposed to. The casein would break free randomly, and the watercolor would stay really glossy, which I’ve never seen watercolor do because I’ve never seen anybody pour large volumes of watercolor. There was also panic: is that because it’s not going to remain stable? That added another layer of variable and decision-making, or choices that I call my palette. Lots of testing, lots of side pours and letting sit and then feverishly writing strange notes. Instead of pre-deciding what it would be, we’d do something and then instantly write it on the side of a cup or on the side of the panel or put a piece of tape next to it, so that if it did something that was desirable, I could replicate that. I started to make the final compositions and thought, “Wait a minute, which one of those things was I thinking of? Oh right, we did this, this, and this.”

Rail: Several of the paintings are diptychs or triptychs and I was interested when it seemed like the pours were picked up by another panel, and where they weren’t. How were you making the decision to work in these polyptych formats? Were you working across them all at the same time? Or were you thinking, “I’m making eight panels, and now I’m going to pull these three and put them together”?

Williams: It was a combination of both. Very early on, there were two methods that I tested before arriving at this series. Because of my architecture background, I wanted the proportions of a house or felt somehow that architecture should be part of the story. I did a whole other series where I mimicked the house typology that would have been in the rural South in that time. We made scale versions of a house and did pours of the paint inside these volumes. The proportion of all the panels comes from ideas about basic cuts of lumber—a typical plywood sheet, a typical drywall sheet in industrial production—some of which are based on the limits of what a machine could expedite or looking at the amount of wood you can yield from a tree. The typical 4-by-8-foot plywood became that dimension. The biggest panels are diptychs of those. The early thought was I would just start with the raw material, and then, in a sense, the “house” is made. The other early idea was the panels make a house, make a box, make a cube, this idea that maybe they unfurl. But I realized I should let these compositions that are emerging dictate and not imagine that I had to make a fully unfolded house. That goes back again to that architectural training, doing lots of drawings of exploded axons, unfolded volumes. But I asked myself, “Why are you making so many rules? No one else will know that. What are the paintings telling you?”

Some of those initial pours looked figurative, which I’ve never done or seen before. It was a little jarring and haunting to make a simple pour and to come back and a figure had emerged, and then to say, “Okay, let the paintings talk to each other.” I’m not usually engaged in that sort of artistic practice, so this was unique for me to confront: “No. That’s a leg? That is a leg. I don’t want it to be a leg.” I’d turn it upside down. I tried to ignore it. “That’s a leg.” Some of the putting together of the individual panels was about that. After that, it became another tool in the toolkit to say, “Okay, now I’m going to start with a diptych where they start together and do these pours across these lines. What happens when they fall into the seams? What happens when I don’t allow a seam? Let the material lead.” It is a combination of some pieces that clearly seem like they wanted to be together, and then others where there was an intentionality early on that these things will come together as diptychs. And I think there are two or three triptychs—one was intentional, and one was undeniable. It just seemed like it had to go together.

Rail: Is that the one where the panels are slightly different sizes?

Williams: Yes! It’s only about a fourth of an inch of difference. That middle panel wanted to be on its own. When the two were together, they were just okay. I was rearranging something in the studio, and realized, “Oh my goodness. Oh, look at that….” Somehow, that middle one is sort of popping up, too. A personality jumped out of that piece when it got formed in that way. It felt, again, scary in the sense of something I would never do. There’s a question for myself of—well, why so little? Or what’s the intrigue of doing a move like that? Would I do that intentionally going forward? Would you start to play with these proportions when you let go of some of these rules that you’ve made for yourself?

Rail: You had a conversation with Derrick Adams, and you were both talking about how things could be left slightly intentionally wrong or off just to give that reassurance or affirmation that, “Yes, I made this thing, and I made it this way deliberately.” I was thinking about that when I noticed those panels and realized, “Oh my God, there it is. That’s exactly what they were talking about.”

Williams: There’s that big wall with the soil on one side and then the pigment on the other. That decision was made to make sure that you could tell a hand was involved, even though it’s the scale of architecture. We could have very easily just sprayed it or done something that was very uniform and monolithic, because that space is so pristine and beautiful in that way.

Rail: I’ve been thinking about that wall incessantly because, of course, I’ve been to the gallery before, and you made a decision to make this wall present in a way that’s not about support, it’s about something else. It is its own element, and it’s neither architecture nor art, but it’s also both architecture and art. The red clay color faces out and is what we see when we first walk into the gallery. It wraps around one of the corners, and it’s very matte and very flat. When I first walked into the gallery, I thought, “Is that Cor-Ten? Whoa.” But as I got closer to it, I realized it was actually kind of crumbly, delicate, and brittle. It is not supple, but the way that we can think about it can be; it can breathe with us. As we walk around it, you have the blue, and it has its own corner; the blue becomes an environment. Rather than paintings hanging on the wall, paint is the wall. The paint itself occupies the space.

Williams: I think that also hearkens back to what I was talking about earlier: in architecture school you learn to see that one line can mean five hundred things, and with these drawing techniques—these axonometrics, these isometrics—you’re seeing a building. You’re seeing the space in a way that you will never be able to occupy, but then you also can never go into a real space again without that ability to stand there and mentally unfold the whole space, or to deconstruct it, or to start in a corner and, with your eye, trace the entire volume, and then to crumble it up, or to flatten it, or to fold it along an imaginary axis. Whenever I enter a space, I’m doing that kind of calculus all the time.

I knew I wanted to do something that called attention to that wall’s singularity. There are four walls; there are columns. It doesn’t serve a structural purpose. It probably hides something mechanical, but it stands alone. It seemed like such a beautiful metaphor. Not to fully anthropomorphize, but this idea of bringing to life the meaning of these other components, the soil, and also the idea of the ground being lifted up. And you understand the significance and the magnitude of hundreds of acres: imagine when they thought they’d hit on this financial resource. It’s farther than the eye can see. It’s like, how much blue could we make? How do you capture that monumentality and the potential of that? And then to turn the corner and see the result, you know? It had to compete in terms of its kind of grandeur, while also giving you the sensation of what one hundred pounds of pure Prussian Blue pigment looks like in a bag. What is it like when you want to hug the wall, you want to eat the wall, because you want to get that sensation? There’s also something because of its scale and because it is architecture: the mark wanted to be different from all the other marks. The decision not to paint the wall as a large Amanda painting, but instead to bring in my practice of shrouding architecture. That seemed important.

If it had been flat, you’d read it as a painting. And I think the minute we turn the corner, it does influence how you move through the space. It’s showing off a little bit. Architects know how to move people through spaces, and it moves you through the space. But it also gives you the impression that that thing is massive, even though it often disappears in that space when it’s white. Often in that space, the scale of that wall disappears because Casey Kaplan is a master at getting your eye to follow other sightlines. I actually forgot that wall was there, and then I came back and said, “Oh, how could I miss this?” You’ll never forget that wall again.

Rail: The red clay coating, for lack of a better word, forms a plane. And the way that you’ve painted the blue, it’s almost like staggered floorboards or something—

Williams: Right. It’s like units.

Rail: Yes, strokes made with a wide roller brush. The blue side is volume. Between plane and volume, in one element you’ve made architecture. It’s a wonderful economy of means.

Williams: Yes, that gesture made sure that architecture was in the dialogue. But it also let me fully translate the meaning, because once I recreated the pigment, I originally called it Carver Innovation Blue. Casey asked a beautiful question: “When does it become Amanda Innovation Blue, or just Innovation Blue?” When does the Carver biography go away? I held on to it for a long time, and then I realized that all these parts of the story maybe aren’t as important. Using color for architecture, that’s my biography. It’s what Carver intended it for, but it also honors and brings in that I’m trained in a Western perspective. My family is from Alabama, and there are these connections, but there’s also this ability to say, “What are these other things I get to own?” A strong acumen for modern architecture. I can do that, too. That’s something I enjoy, I’m good at, I’m trained to do, and it is part of the biography, as much as my great-grandmother’s name, as much as the houses that my parents grew up in, which might have been similar to the types of places that Carver was describing. It is that vernacular, and it is also the international, global sensibility. It’s exciting when you let that come out, and it’s not forced. It was there in a way that was much more genuine than if I’d been painting little replicas of houses, which is a thought that did come through my mind early on.

Rail: We go from the wall, which is gigantic, to the pigment and clay collages, which are quite small, so we have a dialogue about scale. I think, too, about the handmade and the use of materials, even when they might be considered discardable materials. Part of the collage material in The stretch to look behind and weep (Tuskegee) (2024) has fallen into the frame, and it’s sitting there in such a poignant way that it just made me fall in love with it. There’s the recognition that things will decay, yes, and there is a certain silence in the work. How do we grapple with this idea that you’re working with pigments that are natural, and there will be a life cycle for them?

Williams: I purposely shifted the title of some of the collages to “The reach to look ahead and smile” so that their fragile nature wouldn’t totally remain sad. But there’s this kind of frustration, like no matter how much effort Black people make, it’s constantly the same result. You worry when you’re viewing the collages that something else is going to fall off. How long will it last? What is the material? That fragility, that shift in the material seemed perfect to make that kind of analogy. Because it’s real. Even though you can tell a hand did it, they look like they’re floating, they’re magical, but all these pieces fell. It’s a reminder that it sits in the frame. They’re layered on top of each other. They’re made out of materials that won’t last forever.

I try to call attention to the irony of our desire to make things last forever and to question which things we hold up, pretending they will be immortal just because we think they should be, versus things that we’re willing to let decay or we accelerate the decay of. We spend so much energy on stewardship of Rome and Greece and these buildings that we need conceptually to stand forever. They already are ruins, so we preserve the ruins, but it’s okay to tear a house down on 69th and Bishop in Chicago, because, well, it wasn’t that good anyway, and who lived there? It’s a game we play that somehow that material is forever, and this material, even though it’s the same material, is not forever. There’s a fragility in that; you have to think about care. The person who owns that collage, how are they going to care for it? At what point will they let it go? Do they expect to conserve it? And then, what does all of that mean?

Carver went through this whole process. It’s not easy to get a patent. It’s definitely not easy for a Black man in the South in the 1920s to get a patent. But the hope was that they could participate in this American dream, and they could monetize intelligence, and they could use it to fund the education of more intelligence. And that all of that doesn’t come to pass. We can do some digging and find out the facts of why. But the reality is, it didn’t, despite this outsized effort. And in the end, it’s up to us to either say, well, that was then, and you know, I’ve got my phone and my favorite takeout spot, and that’s all that’s important to me. Or take from that legacy, recreate it with all its opportunities. What’s our level of investment in being present and caring for things and doing things?