Gerald Williams: Screaming at the Sky: KAVI GUPTA | WASHINGTON BLVD. FL.2

AfriCOBRA founder Gerald Williams has long worked at the intersection of abstraction and figuration, a condition he has described as “mimesis at midpoint.” Emerging from his early years with the collective, his practice initially balanced recognizable form with rhythmic abstraction before gradually expanding into increasingly immersive fields of accumulation. Across decades spent living in Africa beginning in the late 1970s, followed by extended periods in Asia and Europe before returning to the United States in the 2000s, Williams developed the meticulous “dot” language that continues to define his work today. Shaped in part by the intensity and clarity of East African light, as well as by global visual traditions ranging from beadwork to pointillism to print-based CMYK processes, these works reflect a sustained inquiry into how image is constructed through repetition, structure, and perception. Williams has described the dot as both unit and system—an elemental mark through which image, collective identity, field, and meaning are formed. In this sense, the paintings propose a kind of universality: a visual field in which all forms are composed of smaller interrelated parts, hovering between order and dispersion, structure and flux. Far from the optical exercises of the French masters, these labor-intensive works unfold as meditative fields of attention, where perception itself becomes the subject.

Williams' Face in the Crowd series extends this system directly into portraiture. Individual figures emerge from dense accumulations of painted marks, where identity is built through repetition rather than outline. The mask-like faces that surface within these compositions carry an affinity with African and Indigenous masking traditions, sharing visual logics in which the face operates as a site of transformation, mediation, and collective presence. Here, recognition is assembled slowly through rhythm, proximity, and fragmentation. In this way, the series brings Williams’ broader pointillist language into explicit dialogue with figuration. The face is distributed across the surface and reconstituted through fields of color and gesture, creating a practice of portraiture rooted in accumulation, where individuality and collectivity are held in continuous tension, and where the act of seeing becomes inseparable from the act of building meaning through countless small, deliberate marks.

In Screaming at the Sky, Williams transforms an act of emotional release into a meditation on endurance, spirituality, and transcendence. The composition channels a sense of urgency through vibrant color, layered forms, and rhythmic movement, evoking a moment in which personal expression expands beyond the individual and into the cosmic. The work presents a landscape obscured by Williams’ signature layers of meticulously applied dots, embodying his concept of “mimesis at midpoint,” where recognizable forms dissolve into fields of energy and sensation. The title suggests both protest and prayer a gesture directed outward toward forces larger than oneself while the painting ultimately affirms the possibility of resilience, reflection, and connection amid uncertainty. Within its expansive cosmic field, a landscape emerges: an illusion of the sun rising over the moon, anchored by a subtle horizon line that positions the viewer between earthly and celestial realms. The work reflects a visual language shaped over decades of exploration. During his time in Nairobi as a Peace Corps volunteer, Williams encountered the intensity and clarity of East African light, prompting a profound evolution in his approach to mark-making. His gestures slowed and became increasingly meditative, leading to the development of the intricate pointillist structures that continue to define his practice today—dense constellations of dots built through a laborious and contemplative process. In Screaming at the Sky, these accumulated marks form a field of memory, movement, and spiritual inquiry.

Williams’ layered Plexiglas paintings extend his investigation of space, perception, and dimensionality beyond the traditional plane. Built through layers of translucent surfaces, these works generate shifting visual experiences that change with movement, light, and viewing position. The series reflects Williams’ enduring interest in creating images that are simultaneously material and immaterial, physical and metaphysical. This work concludes the Portraits X, Y, Z series, of which Y, and Z completed in 2007 began as meditations on canvas before expanding into acrylic-on-Plexiglas constructions in Williams’ recent practice. The initial Portraits Y, and Z in the series have respectively been shown at major institutional venues including the Met Breuer, AFRICOBRA 50 at Kavi Gupta, Tate Modern, Brooklyn Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami. Across the series of three, Williams extends his portrait practice into layered, translucent fields where the image is constructed through depth, light, and movement. Within this composition, a mask-like figure pulses to the surface and dissolves in a sky of dots, recalling Williams’ broader engagement with African and Indigenous masking traditions in which the face operates as a site of transformation, mediation, and shifting identity. Here, masking is not literal but perceptual—produced through layering, transparency, and the instability of viewing itself.