Kelly's Environments

Abstract The history of “postwar” art in Paris remains to be further written to reflect its multiplicity and complexity, arguably nowhere more so than in view of the African-diasporic art scenes shaping the liberated though waning capital of mid-century modernism. The related scholarship on contemporaneous African American artists living and working in Paris has largely focused on eminent writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin, and more recently on painters such as Beauford Delaney or Ed Clark. The Detroit artist Kelly (Williams) moved and exhibited in that early 1950s expat scene that largely revolved around the rive gauche artist-run space Galerie Huit. Devising an installational practice and experimenting with nontraditional paints and mediums, lighting, and found objects, Kelly’s assemblages noticeably deviated not only from his compatriots’ more formalist practices but also represented an early instance of constructed and accumulated environment, the distinctly (sub-)urban, cursory, and unfixed genre that would come to be associated with an aesthetic of the post-traumatic and the entropic from the late 1950s to 1960s. Conventionally specified as seemingly indiscriminate selections and diffuse amalgamations of mass-produced and mass-disposable materials and interpreted to reflect existentialist release, on the one hand, and capitalist alienation, on the other, Kelly’s form of environment introduced components and readings that have been heretofore subsumed and excepted, touching on residuals of historically perilous African American inhabitance and economies.