Making Immaterial Matter, a lecture from Amanda Williams

Amanda Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect at Cornell University. Amanda’s practice blurs the distinction between art and architecture. Her projects use color as a lens to highlight the complexities of the politics of race, place and value in cities. She is best known for her series, “Color(ed) Theory,” in which she painted the exterior of soon-to-be-demolished houses on the south side using a culturally charged color palette to mark the pervasiveness of vacancy and blight in black urban communities. The landscapes in which she operates are the visual residue of the invisible policies and forces that have misshaped most inner cities.

Amanda is an Efroymson Family Contemporary Arts Fellow, a 3Arts awardee, recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Arts Foundation Design/Build commission in collaboration with Andres L. Hernandez, part of the ensemble selected to represent the US in the upcoming Venice Architecture Biennale, and a member of the multidisciplinary Exhibition Design team for the Obama Presidential Center, 2018 United States Artists Fellow and a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grants. She has current exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Arts Club of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a highly sought after lecturer on the subject of art and design in the public realm, including talks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New Museum’s Ideas City series. Amanda recently served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and is currently a Visiting Professor at Cornell University. She lives and works on Chicago’s south side.