Amanda Williams

Visual Artist and Architect

Amanda Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect. Her creative practice employs color as an operative means for drawing attention to the complex ways race informs how we assign value to the spaces we occupy. Williams's installations, sculptures, paintings, and works on paper seek to inspire new ways of looking at the familiar and, in the process, raise questions about the inequitable state of urban space and ownership in America. Her breakthrough series Color(ed) Theory, a set of condemned South Side of Chicago houses, painted in a monochrome palette derived from racially and culturally codified color associations, has been named by the New York Times one of the 25 most significant works of postwar architecture in the world. Her ongoing series, What Black Is This You Say?, is a multi-platform project that explores the wide range of meanings and conceptual colors that connote Blackness. Using her Instagram account as an initial platform to challenge the 2020 rush to celebrate Black lives, the work has evolved into paintings, soundworks, and a multi-year public installation in New York. Amanda has exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Hammer Museum to name a few. She serves as a board member for the Terra Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and the Garfield Park Conservatory. She is a founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective. Her work is in several permanent collections including the MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian. Williams has been widely recognized, most recently being named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. She lives and works in Chicago.