Amanda Williams (artist) facts for kids

Amanda Williams (born in 1974) is a talented artist who lives in Bridgeport, Chicago. She grew up in Chicago's South Side and first studied to be an architect. Her art explores ideas about color, race, and how we use space. She often blends art and architecture in her projects.

Williams has taught at several universities, including California College of the Arts and Cornell University. She has also given talks at famous places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a TED conference.

Early Life and Learning

Amanda Williams was born in Evanston, Illinois. She spent her childhood in the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. For high school, she attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.

In 1997, she earned her Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University. After college, she worked for an architecture company in San Francisco for six years. Then, she moved back to Chicago to become a full-time artist.

Art Projects and Important Works

Amanda Williams' art often looks at how race, city spaces, and color connect. Her background as an architect strongly influences her work. She found that painting on canvas felt too small for her ideas. A critic encouraged her to make her art much bigger, like buildings.

One of her projects, called What Black is This, You Say?, was shown at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. This artwork was her way of responding to the movement for Black lives, which grew after the death of George Floyd.

Color(ed) Theory Project

Her most famous project is Color(ed) Theory. It was first shown at the Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2015. This project bravely looked at race and space in the South Side of Chicago.

Between 2014 and 2016, Williams painted eight empty houses in the Englewood neighborhood. Friends and family helped her. She chose eight colors that she felt represented Black culture in the South Side. These included colors like Harold's Chicken Shack red and Crown Royal Bag purple.

The bright colors turned the empty houses into art pieces. This helped people notice the problem of not enough money being invested in Black communities. It also showed how these neighborhoods were declining. The project was later shown as a series of photographs.

Chicago Works: First Solo Show

Amanda Williams had her first solo art show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA Chicago). It ran from July to December in 2017. In this show, she explored how cities change.

She displayed sculptures and photos that focused on how the value of materials changes based on where they are. Williams wanted people to think about the social, political, and racial stories that make a neighborhood seem less valuable. Her work focused on Chicago's South Side, but her ideas apply to many cities.

One part of the show featured gold brick installations. Williams and her helpers carefully painted bricks with imitation gold leaf. These bricks came from the demolished Color(ed) Theory houses. In one piece, It’s a Gold mine/ Is the Gold Mine?, a stack of gold-painted bricks sat on a pallet. By using bricks from torn-down buildings, Williams gave new value to materials once thought useless. Painting them gold and showing them in a museum made them even more special.

Another piece, She’s Mighty Mighty, Just Letting’ It All Hang Out, was a golden brick wall that blocked a gallery entrance. This showed how some spaces are not open to everyone. These gold bricks continued the ideas from her Color(ed) Theory project. They highlighted how tearing down and rebuilding can affect people in cities.

Cadastral Shaking Art

For the start of Lori Lightfoot's time as mayor of Chicago, the Smart Museum of Art loaned Cadastral Shaking (Chicago v1). This artwork is part of a series of prints. Williams created them with journalist Natalie Y. Moore. They are based on old maps of Chicago from the Federal Housing Administration. These maps were used in a practice called redlining, which unfairly limited where people of color could live.

She Built NYC Monument

In 2019, Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous were chosen to create a public monument. This monument will honor Shirley Chisholm, a very important woman in American history. It is planned for Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York.

Selected Art Shows

Solo Exhibitions:

• 2017: Chicago Works: Amanda Williams - Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL
• 2017: A Way, Away (Listen While I Say) - Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO

Group Exhibitions:

• 2019: Solidary and Solitary - Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, IL
• 2018: Dimensions of Citizenship - Venice Biennale of Architecture
• 2015: Colo(red) Theory - Chicago Architecture Biennial, Chicago, IL

Awards and Recognition

Amanda Williams has received many important awards for her art:

• MacArthur Foundation Grant, 2022
• United States Artists Fellow for Architecture & Design, 2018
• Designer for the U.S. team at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2018
• Member of the design team for the Obama Presidential Center, 2018
• Painter & Sculptors Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation, 2017
• Efroysom Family Contemporary Arts Fellow, 2016