Black History Month: Collection in Focus - Aubrey Williams (1926 - 1990)

This Black History Month has seen events across Glasgow Life Museums   including tours at Glasgow Museums Resource Centre – which for the one I delivered includes recently acquired works by Aubrey Williams (8 May 1926 – 17 April 1990). 2026 marks the artist’s centenary and events have been coordinated with museums and collections in the UK holding his works by October Gallery and his daughter Maridowa, who manages his estate.  Williams is most known for his large abstract oil paintings on canvas which thematically drew from his experiences living and working as an Agricultural Field Officer in rural areas in North-West Guyana with the Warao people alongside his interests in the cosmos, science fiction, vulcanology and music – particularly the works of Shostakovich in a series he painted in the early 1980’s.

Like all artists sometimes the work we know them for is only a small part of their overall practice and the recent monograph – published in 2024 has wonderful essays commissioned from research into his broader practice, including later works of immaculately accomplished depictions of birds (often from Guyana) – one of which is currently on display in TATE Britain – to figurative work and portraits. He was also commissioned for public murals in Guyana, Jamaica and Canada. In 2001 his wife Eve Williams and his daughter Maridowa Williams donated the Personal papers of Aubrey Williams 1950s–1990 to TATE, where they are held in the institutional archive.

The two works in Glasgow Life Museums’ collection (Maridowa Series IV 1964 and Rockface 1964) were painted in the early 1960’s around 10 years after he attended St Martins School of Art, London. They are not as well-known as his later series, but they were made at similar time to the early ceramics that we have in the collection by the artist Donald Locke – who knew and wrote about Williams’ work[i] . We were particularly interested in acquiring these early works for the collection as in 1965, Glasgow was one of the host cities for the Commonwealth Arts Festival, which mounted the exhibition 4 Painters, 1 Sculptor at Gilmorehill Hall, on the University of Glasgow campus. The exhibition included four paintings from Williams, and his work was shown alongside that of Arthur Boyd (Australia), Avinash Chandra (India), Ben Osawe (Nigeria) and Jean-Paul Riopelle (Canada). Maridowa Series IV and Rockface were included in the catalogue for the show, which along with the other works, demonstrated his interest in abstract expressionism - colour, composition and texture. For us the connections to the city of both works were a key factor in their selection.  They were acquired through the New Collecting Award funded by Art Fund – which was a project with freelance curators Mother Tongue (2018 – 2026) and the paintings were first shown in 2022 in the exhibition – Revisiting the work of Black artists in Scotland through new collecting.

Aubrey Williams was born in Georgetown, Guyana, where as a teenager he attended classes at the Working Peoples' Art Class (WPAC). WPAC was founded by Edward Rupert Burrowes in 1945 and while it taught art from a western perspective, Burrowes is credited by Williams as ‘opening the Guyanese eyes to art’. After training as an agronomist, he worked as an Agricultural Field Officer over a two-year period 1947 – 49 in the North-West region of the country in the village of Horosoro. Living in this area inhabited primarily by the indigenous Warao people was influential on his thinking and his lifetime interest in pre-Columbian arts and cultures was evident in works throughout his career. In 1952 travelled to the UK with Eve Lafargue[ii] who he would marry in 1954. After a short period in Leicester, where he originally went to study agricultural engineering under a scholarship, he headed south to become a painter and studying at St Martins School of Art (1953-4). His first exhibition was in London in 1954 at the Archer Gallery, with other exhibitions following initially in London and the UK, then Europe, Guyana, Jamaica and the USA.  During this time Williams also travelled round Europe meeting Picasso in the 1950’s, although he would note that:

Aubrey Williams returned to Guyana in 1966 after the country gained independence and at the same time in 1966 he was a founder member of the Caribbean Artists Movement in the UK, which was a network of Caribbean writers, artists and intellectuals including other founder members Kamau Brathwaite, Barbadian poet and historian, John La Rose, Trinidadian poet, publisher and activist, and Andrew Salkey, Jamaican novelist, poet and journalist. This network was a dynamic hub of activity centring around Caribbean cultural and social members living in the UK which continued programming events, contributing to the discussions, ideas and debates on the ambitions and limitations on being Caribbean or British artist until 1972 when it dissolved.

During this time Williams also travelled to work for extended periods in Jamaica and the USA and from the early 1970’s he lived between Jamaica, Florida and London. While his work was initially lauded with him winning awards (including the Commonwealth Prize for painting in 1965), showing in exhibitions and painting public commissions in the UK, Guyana and Jamaica, and his work is now considered important in the development of 20th century abstraction painting, he felt that he was confronted by ‘institutional indifference’, with his work framed and discussed solely in terms of ‘otherness’. He did have champions of his work during his lifetime with Guy Brett and Anne Walmsley publishing on his work, and his work is now represented in collections such as TATE (UK), Victoria & Albert Museum (UK), Natural History Museum (UK) Contemporary Art Centre, (Kingston, Jamaica), Guyana House of Assembly (Georgetown, Guyana), National Collection of Guyana, Castellani House (Georgetown, Guyana) and National Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica).

Williams' exclusion from Western art history can be attributed to systemic racism across the UK and the art world, though his style is akin to other influential artists across the abstraction and painting medium, such as Jackson Pollok and Ashlie Gorky. However, at its core, Williams' work was deeply rooted in themes and ideas of the Caribbean. Later, the writer Guy Brett spoke about the links within Williams’ work that he makes through the interest in pre- Columbian artefacts to contemporary global issues like the destruction of the environment[i]. Williams’ concerns about past histories being repeated in the contemporary ensure his paintings are vibrant in colour, paint and texture on the surface of the canvas with the meaning of these layers merging geological, historical and human ideas. He felt that painting could communicate just as much as the written word and argued strongly that abstraction was ‘no less socially committed as figurative painting’ [ii]

As I noted earlier, before Williams left Guyana in 1952, he had worked as an Agricultural Field Officer among sugar cane field workers on the Guyanese coast and then in a remote northwestern rainforest settlement in the country. This deep understanding of the fauna and landscape of Guyana was an important influence on his painting, but also his interest in ecology, the cosmos and human impact on the world. In his early works the colours and abstract forms are influenced by pre- Columbian myth, artefacts and life along with the Guyanese landscape and petroglyphs created by indigenous peoples such as the Warao, pre - colonial inhabitants of the country. This latter influence was to come into sharper focus in his paintings through the 1980s as did other interests like music, especially Shostakovich.

William’s use of indigenous approaches to colour (which conceive of pigment in a material continuum with the environment) led his use of colour and the earthy tones from the landscapes he was familiar with. This colour palette in the early years, alongside the literary, spiritual and musical influences - merge and immerse a viewer in the paintings with no immediate narrative, but potential layers of meaning. In his work Williams drew from sources in science, nature and human histories abstracting ideas in paint on the surface of a canvas and concerned with form, colour and texture. In this period in the early 1960’s fellow artist Donald Locke wrote that he was fascinated with a film by vulcanologist Haroun Tazieff and noted ‘that he spoke with a great feeling of gratitude for his association with the lecturer who had introduced him to an aspect of nature he was passionately interested in’. This experienced influenced a series of works ‘Magma’, ‘Lava’, ‘Volcano’ and the work now in Glasgow Museums’ collection - Rockface ’. Locke went on to write ‘What is fascinating about these paintings, of which three are in Georgetown, is that they are closely related to the subject of pregnancy and parturition which has always fascinated him. `he portrays the very molten rock as if it were flesh, finding a unique equation between two diametrically opposing natures[iii]

Rockface 1964 and Maridowa Series IV 1964 were painted during the period between his arrival in the UK in 1952 - during the height of the Guyanese independence movement – and Guyana gaining independence in 1966, the same year in which Williams became a founding member of the Caribbean Artists’ Movement CAM. While his thinking and his social circle were political and related to the wider Black movements in the UK, his artwork in its abstraction is not overtly political, however the lived experience is there. He spoke about the colonial history he grew up with as ‘a traumatic inheritance’ at a 1967 CAM Symposium. Here he also discusses claw like forms that appear in his work (including Maridowa Series IV), and he also sees in the work of his Caribbean peers. He sees these ‘claws as ‘very tense, a slightly violent shape coming in. It has haunted me all my life and I don’t understand it’.

Having lived in Georgetown within a middleclass family, he could see the benefits he gained but also was also active resisting the incumbent colonial power, with his daughter Maridowa (when I met her) recalling his subversion of dress codes when invited to events at Governor Wooley’s house. During his time in North-West Guyana and working on sugar cane plantations, he began looking through his country through a decolonial lens noting the way that ‘modern/contemporary’ westerners see the landscape as an impenetrable jungle to clear in their hunt for initially gold, then clearances for plantations (ie: extractive)  verses indigenous peoples seeing the land as a sacred geography inscribed with petroglyphs to maintain a spiritual and ecological balance between human needs and the natural environment (ie: symbiotic relationship). The experience of being based in Horosoro in North-west Guyana with the Warao people and his ecological concern for the planet and consequences of modernity influenced him throughout his career.

Many thanks to Maridowa Williams and Ian Dudley for conversations with Aubrey Williams’ work at Glasgow Museums Resource Centre earlier this year. Thank you also to those visitors on the tours this year with insightful questions and comments. A final thank you to Tasmin Evans, Curator of Social History at Glasgow Life Museums for her insightful suggestions for this blog post. 

Katie Bruce, October 2026

Aubrey Williams – some links

Aubrey Williams: Art, Histories, Futures. The monograph is edited by Ian Dudley and Maridowa Williams, with a foreword by Alex Farquharson, introduction by Kobena Mercer and is published by the Paul Mellon Centre.

TATE Archive Presented to Tate Archive by the artist's widow, Mrs Eve Williams and the artist's daughter, Maridowa Williams, 2001.

October Gallery – talk for Future Conscious, 1 July 2023