The city’s reigning artists, gallerists, curators, and community builders have created a style all their own

"It's huge and it seems surreal, but it’s also like you can stand here and see it," mused artist Amanda Williams on a brisk Oct. 15 morning as she watched volunteers plant 100,000 red tulip bulbs across several vacant Washington Park lots.

By spring, the intersection of 53rd Street and Prairie Avenue will be awash in a sea of red tulips — 6 acres of them to be exact, planted Oct. 15 by artist Amanda Williams, 2022 MacArthur grant recipient, South Side residents, and the Emerald South Economic Development Collaborative.

CHICAGO (CBS) -- Visionary artist and architect Amanda Williams has been named a MacArthur Fellow, one of three Chicagoans who received a so-called "Genius" grant this year.

Earlier this week, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the prestigious fellowships known as “genius grants” that recognize society-changing people whose work offers inspiration and insight.

The 25 recipients of the $800,000 stipend include an author of a banned memoir, a creator of community art installations and a scientist obsessed with trash.

The 2022 awards are going to artists, activists, scholars, scientists and others who have shown “exceptional creativity.” The grants are a bit bigger than before: $800,000 over five years.

Reimagining public space to expose the complex ways that value, both cultural and economic, intersects with race in the built environment.

“If the U.S. cultural present were a color,” Anna Watkins Fisher writes in her new book, “it would be Safety Orange.” The highly visible hue is the subject of a new 98-page volume, Safety Orange, which came out in January as part of the University of Minnesota Press’s reliably good “Forerunners” series. The book considers the color as an emblem of neoliberal “responsibilization.”

Amanda Williams is the recipient of the 2022 Public Art Dialogue Award for achievement in the field of public art. To mark the occasion, in February 2022, PAD member and scholar TK Smith conducted an interview with the artist. Together, they discussed Williams’ recent public art projects, the value of color and material, and the body in its absence.

The Hammer Museum at UCLA will be shining a spotlight and asking visitors to deeply reflect on one of the country’s most acclaimed authors and thinkers in its new exhibition “Joan Didion: What She Means.” The exhibition grapples with the evolution of Didion’s singular voice as a writer, observer of place and family, and chronicler of our times.

The exhibition showcases treasures from the COD Permanent Art collection and explores the historical precedents and issues contemporary artists address today, while bringing members of the community together to engage in thoughtful discussion about works on display. "Hooking Up: Meet the Collection" offers a rare opportunity for visitors to draw links between disparate works of art while connecting with others within the museum and beyond. 

Jasmine Sanders addresses the economic, architectural, and chromatic roots of Amanda Williams’s new paintings.

Part art nerd, part crusader, Antwaun Sargent has gathered the works of Black artists in two books, “Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists” and “The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion.” He continues to oversee exhibitions and publish critical commentary on, among others, Kehinde Wiley, Alexandria Smith, Nick Cave and Amanda Williams. Ms. Williams’s show of vibrantly colorful canvases is on view through July 8 at Park & 75, a Gagosian space, one of 10 projects that Mr. Sargent will juggle this summer.

In New York City, five must-see exhibitions are dedicated to Amanda Williams, Vivian Browne, Shikeith, Alberta Whittle, Alanis Forde, and Akilah Watts. The artists work in a variety of mediums, most prominently painting.

Concurrent to her fascination with color theory, the artist took it upon herself to use this knowledge in order to reclaim for the people spaces decalred unworthy, employing her own personal theory of color to find a common ground.

Can race and color be separated? Deeply concerned with the way that color shapes our world, Chicago-based architect and artist Amanda Williams has long engaged with this question in her practice. Williams’s ongoing fascination with color is rooted in a quest to unearth the possibilities and limits of racialized—both theoretical and real—readings of color.

Gagosian is pleased to present CANDYLADYBLACK, an exhibition of new paintings by Amanda Williams from the series What Black Is This, You Say? (2020–). Williams’s painting What black is this you say?—Although rarely recognized as such, ‘The Candy Lady’ and her ‘Candy Store’ provided one of your earliest examples of black enterprise, cooperative economics, black women CEOs and good customer service”—black (07.24.20) (2021) was included, along with earlier works in the series, in Social Works II at Gagosian London in 2021. CANDYLADYBLACK is her first solo exhibition at the gallery.

The “Slave Play” actress and the Chicago-based artist discuss generational gaps, success and the art that brought them each acclaim.

RECORD has announced the 2021 winners of its Women in Architecture Design Leadership awards, which recognize and promote the role of women in the profession in the U.S. across five categories: Design Leader, New Generation Leader, Innovator, Activist and Educator. Now in its eighth year, the award’s winners for 2021 are Design Leader Annabelle Selldorf, New Generation Leader Amanda Williams, Innovator Julie Bargmann, Educator Deborah Berke, and Activist Tamarah Begay. Through their efforts in design and in tackling broader social challenges, these five women have proved to be inspiring leaders in the field of architecture and beyond.

The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) reopened its doors during the COVID epidemic on August 27, 2020. The entrance was taken over by a series of physical controls to guarantee the health of the few visitors that would be allowed in. Only a hundred guests were allowed each hour. In fact, the total capacity was capped at a quarter of the usual number. This experience—of being at the museum almost on our own—allowed for a different phenomenology of being there.

By Charles L. Davis II

The espousal of the doctrine of Negro inferiority by the South was
primarily because of economic motives and the inter-connected

political urge necessary to support slave industry; but to the watch-
ing world it sounded like the carefully thought out result of experi-
ence and reason; and because of this it was singularly disastrous for

modern civilization in science and religion, in art and government,
as well as in industry. The South could say that the Negro, even
when brought into modern civilization, could not be civilized, and
that, therefore, he and the other colored peoples of the world were
so far inferior to the whites that the white world had a right to rule
mankind for their own selfish interests.

– W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

Chicago-based artist Amanda Williams – tipped by architect Frida Escobedo as one of 25 creative leaders of the future in Wallpaper’s 25th Anniversary Issue ‘5x5’ project – uses colour to dissect politics, urban landscapes and Black social space.

Three architects, three journalists and two designers gathered over Zoom to make a list of the most influential and lasting buildings that have been erected — or cleverly updated — since World War II. Here are the results.

A list of new and recently released books from Chicago authors or publishers, plus some books you might have missed when they first came out.

What does it mean to watch and move through space, in dance and in life? As we emerge from the pandemic, we still have a moment to hold on to all that’s slow.

Amanda Williams’s ‘Embodied Sensations’ at MoMA; Matthew Wong’s ink drawings; and installations by Cameron Rowland take on policing.

On April 28, 2021 Design in Dialogue welcomed Amanda Williams, an artist whose work questions the ways that context changes the perception of the material culture of the built envionment. 

Curators and educators talk with the artist about her participatory project at MoMA, and how it helps process this moment.
 

Artists Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous use architecture to explore liberatory possibilities for Black communities.

A new collective of Black architects and artists, formed out of a show now at MoMA, aims to “reclaim the larger civic promise of architecture.” The MoMA show was organized by Sean Anderson, an associate curator at the museum, and Mabel O. Wilson, an architect, Columbia University professor and author, among much else, of “White by Design,” which describes the Modern’s failure to display and collect works by Black architects and designers.

The artist’s brightly painted houses return forgotten sections of Chicago’s south side to vibrant life.

Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot will join the Mayor’s Office of Community Engagement and other City leaders for a celebratory virtual event to commemorate Black History Month by honoring 20 Black community leaders for their commitment to supporting and advocating for Chicago’s dynamic Black residents.

Amanda Williams responds to Blackout Tuesday, a viral Instagram movement in reaction to recent police brutality and racism, with her new series: What Black Is This, You Say? 

“My beginning of the series was actually a little bit of a pushback both of the need for people to think there has to be an immediate answer, usually not a well thought out answer, and simultaneously that Blackness is monolithic,” Williams said. “So, all Black people need to get on board with subscribing to a certain way of expressing Blackness, or frustrations with injustice. And there’s less and less tolerance for more than one way to do that.”

In lieu of her Open House Lecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design scheduled for April 2, 2020 that was cancelled due to the Covid-19 outbreak, Williams speaks with Sala Elise Patterson about her work, purpose, and path. 

On a clear October evening, a full house gathered at the Newberry, Chicago’s world-renowned independent research library, to listen to a conversation between author, photographer and former Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey and visual artist Amanda Williams.

In his new book, Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side, Bey documents the physical attributes of significant architecture with striking photographic images portrayed at their best under the bright, blue skies of morning light. Throughout the book he thoughtfully weaves a cultural and social narrative elevating these environs to their rightful importance while criticizing forces and policies that have ignored the South Side’s rich architectural heritage. Echoing Bey’s visual cues, architecture-trained visual artist Amanda Williams’ foreword sets a joyful tone comparing the exuberance of Bey’s work to the happy crescendo of one of her favorite musical pieces: Native Chicagoan Donny Hathaway’s 1970 hit “This Christmas,” with its heartfelt message, “I’m gonna get to know you better,” resounds with the camaraderie and experiences both she and Bey have had with South Side culture.

To put the significance of this book project in perspective, Bey’s ascribed South Side represents an area that makes up more than half the city’s land mass. Approximately bounded by Cermak Road, 138th Street, Lake Michigan and Western Avenue, the area is vast and includes work by architecture and design luminaries, businesses run by notable black entrepreneurs, pioneering artists and a South Side community representing over thirty neighborhoods and a population of nearly 800,000.

Review of Amanda Williams' Colored Theory series and surrounding work.

Amanda Williams’s Cadastral Shaking (Chicago v1), which depicts a redlined map of Chicago that has been rearranged in effort to imagine how the city’s rampant inequality could be reconfigured, is currently on loan to newly inaugurated Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous won the inaugural commission for She Built NYC with their monument proposal for Prospect Park.

Review of Dimensions of Citizenship at Wrightwood 659.

Review of Dimensions of Citizenship: Architecture and Belonging from the Body to the Cosmos at Wrightwood 659, Chicago.

Profile of Amanda Williams by Ted Loos.

Review of the United States Pavilion Dimensions of Citizesnship at the Venice Architecture Biennale.