A century ago, the renowned scientist and inventor George Washington Carver patented an innovative method for creating paints and stains from Alabama's clay. Carver uncovered a technique to harness the iron-rich soil, combining it with a potassium compound and nitric acid to produce a vibrant blue pigment known as Prussian Blue.

This color had already made a significant impact on the art world when it was accidentally discovered by a Berlin paint maker around 1705. Prussian Blue was used by Pablo Picasso during his melancholic "blue period," chosen by Japanese artist Hokusai for the waves in "The Great Wave off Kanagawa," and is the origin of the term "blueprints" used in architectural plans. Carver's discovery allowed for the direct extraction of this pigment from the earth. Despite his numerous inventions, including his well-known experiments with peanut-based products, this was one of the few he chose to patent.

However, his paint pigments never made it to the commercial market, and Carver's method became one of the many forgotten patents in the archives; his pigments were only visible to those who saw them adorning buildings around Tuskegee University, where Carver taught, and in the surrounding areas.

In the past three years, Chicago-based artist and architect Amanda Williams has been working to revive Carver's blue with the assistance of researchers and scientists. "Typically, blue is produced synthetically… but he was able to source that from an ingredient they had in abundance," Williams explained in a video call. "There was a practicality to it, but there was also ingenuity in figuring out that things around you can yield unexpected results."

Williams was aware of Carver's lesser-known art practice—he had even displayed a painting at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair—but she was curious as to why, out of all his creations, he chose to patent two inventions related to pigment-making (the third being a peanut-based pomade). "It just struck me as very strange. Given all the work it takes to receive a patent—especially in that era, for a Black man, when they were so often denied—why would he expend all this energy on paint?" she questioned. Her quest led her to Tuskegee's library and the labs of The University of Chicago, where she collaborated with chemistry students to revive and refine Carver's method to produce the deep blue from clay.

Now, as part of the art triennial Prospect.6 in New Orleans, Williams has painted two architectural structures of significance to African American history in Carver blue, as a tribute to his capabilities and to Black innovation more broadly. The first is an arts building at Xavier University, the only Catholic Historically Black College or University (HBCU), established in 1925. The second is a shotgun-style house on the campus of the New Orleans African American Museum, located in Tremé, the oldest Black neighborhood in the country, where Williams notes a "lineage" of self-determination. Shotgun houses are modest railroad-style homes that became prevalent after the Civil War for African American families. Having studied shotgun houses during her architectural education and with family in the South— including a cousin who provided soil from Montgomery, Alabama, for pigment testing—Williams connected "a really beautiful thread" to her own biography throughout the project, she explained.

Color and Race

Williams never anticipated finding herself so deeply engrossed in Carver's history—after all, the scientist was best known for his work with agricultural crops. However, she and Carver share an unexpected commonality: their belief in the power of color within complex systems of race, power, and inequity. For Carver, color was a tool to beautify the homes of the region's poorest residents, achievable through natural resources. Like his encouragement for local farmers to enrich themselves by growing abundant crops (which included soybeans, pecans, and sweet potatoes, in addition to peanuts), color was a crucial element of his plans for autonomy, dignity, and prosperity for Black families in the South. He urged people to freshly paint their homes in bright colors and aimed to provide the materials to do so.

Williams has continued the concept of color as a vehicle for transformation in her hometown of Chicago, often employing it to highlight structural inequities. For her project "Color(ed) Theory" from 2014-16, she painted condemned houses in the historically underfunded South Side neighborhood of Englewood in vivid monochromatic colors inspired by products marketed towards Black consumers—from the bright blue hair product Ultra Sheen to the deep purple of whisky Crown Royal's packaging. However, the colors also held a second meaning, as they resembled the shades on discriminatory government maps of US cities used to deny financial services to primarily African American neighborhoods in the 20th century. The practice, known as redlining, had profound effects that continue to impact struggling communities today.

For her commission for Prospect.6, titled "In Her Rich Deposits of (Blue)," Williams chose to focus on "signaling joy, not inequity or disparity," she said. Part of its uplifting spirit stems from its highly collaborative nature, from researchers at Tuskegee who helped answer her questions, to the chemistry students who meticulously tested and updated Carver's methods, to her partners at the location sites who have helped realize the project at meaningful locations. Since the quantity of lab-produced pigments was quite small (Carver originally used large vats heated in the sun over a period of weeks, Williams noted), she also enlisted the help of paint brand Kramer to scale up production.

The triennial will conclude in February, but the duration the buildings remain painted is up to the institutions and time, as the paint differs from the long-lasting commercial latex types used on exteriors today. "The expectation was that it wouldn't last for more than a year, and then you repainted. So that's why you get that beautiful, distressed color and texture with a lot of structures that have stood over time, but have that weathered look," she explained.

"I don't expect it to last forever." Thanks to Tuskegee's archivists, Williams has some answers to her questions, but others persist. Why patent the pigment process? Based on the documents they retrieved, they inferred that Booker T. Washington, who founded Tuskegee and recruited Carver as an educator, saw the value in monetizing it. "He was constantly looking for a way to be able to be autonomous," Williams said of Washington.

"The idea of starting a company that would then produce this (paint) at volume could potentially be the financial source for being able to do other work." Carver may not have patented other ideas due to prohibitive costs and barriers he may have faced as a Black man, though the exact reasons were unclear. Nor could the archivists say why the paint company Carver and Washington founded eventually failed, though they had many challenges in establishing themselves in the commercial paint industry, Williams noted. "It is easy to romanticize the story or to make leaps," she said.

"I appreciated that they offered this scenario as an educated guess, as opposed to a definitive answer." Williams plans to continue the work and research, and keep associating Carver with the blue he innovatively produced. She has considered the artists who have become synonymous with particular shades, such as Yves Klein and International Klein Blue (or Anish Kapoor's controversial exclusive license of Vantablack). "I'm making sure that he's elevated into the conversation, even if it's a different way that he was approaching the idea of color and pigment," she said. "I find it very beautiful that despite his fame and the notoriety as a scientist, at his heart, he was a painter and an artist, and so this was equally important," she added.