The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) welcomes Amanda Williams as the 2018–19 Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor.
Amanda Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect at Cornell University. Her practice blurs the distinction between art and architecture through works that employ color as a way to draw attention to the political complexities of race, place, and value in cities. The landscapes in which she operates are the visual residue of the invisible policies and forces that have misshapen most inner cities. Williams’ installations, paintings, video, 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 in the United States.
Williams has exhibited widely, including at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis. She is a 2018 United States Artists Fellow, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors grantee, an Efroymson Family Contemporary Arts Fellow, a Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow, and a member of the multidisciplinary exhibition design team for the Obama Presidential Center. She is a recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Arts Foundation Design/Build commission in collaboration with SAIC Associate Professor in Art Education Andres L. Hernandez (MA 2004). Williams has served as a visiting assistant professor of Architecture at Cornell University and Washington University in St. Louis. She lives and works on Chicago’s South Side.
As SAIC’s 2018–19 Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor, Williams will co-teach an interdisciplinary course at SAIC. The course will engage faculty and student resources across the Departments of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects; Art History, Theory, and Criticism; and Sculpture.
As part of her professorship, Amanda Williams will participate in SAIC’s fall 2018 Visiting Artists Program lecture series. On Monday, September 10, at 6pm in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Rubloff Auditorium at 230 South Columbus Drive, Williams will give a free lecture open to the public.
Established in 2006 by a generous gift from Bill and Stephanie Sick, the professorship enables internationally renowned artists and designers to visit and teach at SAIC. Previous Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professors include Bruce Mau, Jaume Plensa, Bill Fontana, Catherine Opie, Andrea Zittel, Theaster Gates, Chris Ware, Ann Hamilton, and most recently, Laura Owens.
About the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
For more than 150 years, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) has been a leader in educating the world’s most influential artists, designers and scholars. Located in downtown Chicago with a fine arts graduate program consistently ranking among the top programs in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, SAIC provides an interdisciplinary approach to art and design as well as world-class resources, including the Art Institute of Chicago museum, on-campus galleries and state-of-the-art facilities. SAIC’s undergraduate, graduate and post-baccalaureate students have the freedom to take risks and create the bold ideas that transform Chicago and the world—as seen through notable alumni and faculty such as Michelle Grabner, David Sedaris, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Hunt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Cynthia Rowley, Nick Cave, Jeff Koons and LeRoy Neiman. For more information, please visit saic.edu.
