Amanda Williams

Amanda Williams is a visual artist trained as an architect. Her creative practice employs color as an operative means for drawing attention to the complex ways race informs how they assign value to the spaces they occupy. Williams’ 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 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, was recently named by the New York Times as 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 and celebrate Black lives, the work has evolved into paintings, soundworks, and a yearlong public installation in New York. Photo by Tony Smith.