Stacks on Stacks on Stacks, 2017. Acrylic, plaster, marble dust, ink, imitation goldleaf on pegboard (49 piece), 5 x 7 inches each.
It’s a Goldmine/Is the Gold Mine?, 2016. Imitation gold metal leaf on salvaged Chicago brick, dimensions variable.
Color(ed) Theory Series: Flamin' Red Hots (Demolition Bus), 2018. Color Photograph, 21.125 x 31.125 inches, framed, 19.625 x 29.625 inches, unframed, Edition 2 of 6.
Just Practice Justice, 2018, Neon, 87.5 x 6.5 x 6 inches.
Amanda Williams (b. Chicago, 1974) is a visual artist who trained as an architect at Cornell University. Amanda’s practice blurs the distinction between art and architecture. Her projects use color as a lens to highlight the complexities of the politics of race, place and value in cities. She is best known for her series, "Color(ed) Theory," in which she painted the exterior of soon-to-be-demolished houses on the south side using a culturally charged color palette to mark the pervasiveness of vacancy and blight in black urban communities. The landscapes in which she operates are the visual residue of the invisible policies and forces that have misshaped most inner cities.
Amanda is an United States Artists Fellow, Efroymson Family Contemporary Arts Fellow, a 3Arts awardee, recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Arts Foundation Design/Build commission in collaboration with Andres L. Hernandez, part of the ensemble selected to represent the US in the Venice Architecture Biennale, and a member of the multidisciplinary Exhibition Design team for the Obama Presidential Center and a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grants. She is a highly sought after lecturer on the subject of art and design in the public realm, including talks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New Museum's Ideas City series. Amanda recently served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and as a Visiting Professor at Cornell University. She lives and works on Chicago’s South Side.
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.
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.
This year's Venice Architecture Biennale shaped for the first time by Chicagoans.
