Most viewers, upon encountering Lamar Peterson’s work, will go no further than to subsume the paintings under the generic category of “black figuration.” This is to be expected; most people don’t care enough about art to actually look at it (whether they admit it to themselves or not).

It is the complexity of emotional registers, the playful ambiguity towards content, the energy of her formal immediacy, and her willingness to lean into the grotesque which together form the magnetism of her works. 

In an art landscape populated by chalky paintings made by people who don't care enough about their medium to learn how to use it, crowded alongside paintings based on photos by people who think paintings are just images, it shouldn't be surprising that the gallery-going masses are titillated by a painting with a nice surface.