Gerald Williams, a pivotal figure within the Africobra movement, is acclaimed for his vibrant and dynamic paintings that resonate with themes of Black pride and empowerment. With bold shapes, rich colors, and intricate patterns, his compositions exude energy and vitality, reflecting his background in graphic design. Williams' art serves as a visual narrative of the African American experience, often delving into topics of social justice, identity, and community. Through his work, he seeks to amplify the voices and stories of marginalized communities, promoting cultural visibility and significance. Williams' contributions to the art world extend beyond aesthetics; his commitment to challenging stereotypes and advocating for social change has cemented his legacy as a pioneering artist and activist within the African American art community.
Sun Ship Mode is a painting by AFRICOBRA founder Gerald Williams. The title is a reference to the central figure in the piece, who is held aloft in space within a sun ship. It is also a reference to the John Coltrane album Sun Ship, released after the jazz legend’s death. Despite the presence of the figure in the composition, the painting is less of a literal landscape, and more of an ethereal mindscape inhabited by an assortment of spectral forms and symbolic patterns. The vibrant colors imply an active, harmonious relationship between the heavens and the earth, or perhaps between the future and the past, or the ancestors and the living. This painting belongs to an ongoing series of works Williams began in the late 1970s while living in Africa, which deploys a meticulous pointillist technique of constructing an image out of small dots of color rather than hard edge shapes and forms. Although the image does not immediately relate to the graphic sensibilities of Williams’s historic AFRICOBRA works, many of the fundamental aesthetic and intellectual points are present in these paintings, such as: the embrace of a style that is neither fully figurative nor fully abstract, what AFRICOBRA calls “mimesis at midpoint;” and the use of vibrant “coolade” colors. Most importantly, this work speaks to how each of the AFRICOBRA artists has gone on to evolve their own personal style over the decades. AFRICOBRA set out to convey through visual art a sense of the reality of Black life as it is experienced. Williams spent decades working around the world as a teacher, and developed a highly idiosyncratic vision of how to convey his personal lived experience. That personalized aesthetic language is particularly evident in this body of work.