Amanda Williams

Amanda Williams (b. 1974, Evanston, Illinois) deconstructs the physical and psychological systems of inequity. Informed by her architectural background, Williams’ command of space shapes her meditations on race, color and value. Drawing from an array of source material and using color as an operative logic to interpret the elusive meaning of “blackness,” Williams complicates readings of our spatial surroundings. With a multidisciplinary practice that spans painting, works on paper, photography, sculpture and installation, Williams communicates through a chromatic language of abstract and material means. Williams has exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale; MCA Chicago; MoMA; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, among others. Her work resides in public collections including MoMA, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York. She is co-author of a permanent monument to Shirley Chisholm in Brooklyn, and was a member of the Exhibition Design Team for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. Her breakthrough series Color(ed) Theory, a set of condemned houses, painted in a monochrome palette derived from racially and culturally codified color associations, was named by the New York Times as one of the 25 most significant works of postwar architecture in the world. Amanda is the recipient of the USA Ford Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation award, a Chicagoan of the Year, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Williams received her Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. She lives and works in Chicago.