Amanda Williams
In this excerpt, Amanda Williams, a visual artist and an architect by training, is interviewed by Lauren Halsey, her mentee-turned–visual artist peer. Williams’s use of the architectural medium as a vehicle to find her own language for talking about making both conceptual and physical spaces has become foundational to her practice. Williams and Halsey’s candid conversation journeys through the changing neighborhoods of the South Side of Chicago and South Central Los Angeles, underscoring the devastating impact of redlining and gentrification and the erasure of Black and working-class cultural landmarks. Williams notes her experience at Cornell University and the support she received from working alongside Black and Brown classmates equally invested in transcending institutional racism. Williams’s story merges her theoretical and practical concepts of Black spatial practice while colorfully reimagining how we might occupy past and future histories. This offering from Williams and Halsey is unique because they possess the rare ability and skill to make architecture that is both real and imagined. As Williams says of the duo, “We make space and we make spaces!”
– JaneĢe A. Moses, Director of the Oral History Project