Amanda Williams

Amanda Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect at Cornell University. Her creative practice employs color as an operative means for drawing attention to the complex ways race informs how we assign value to the spaces we occupy. The landscapes in which she operates are the visual residue of the invisible policies and forces that have detrimentally shaped much of the United States. 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.

Amanda has exhibited widely, including the Museum of Modern Art in NY, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the MCA Chicago, and a public commission with Andres L. Hernandez, at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. She is co-designer of a forthcoming permanent monument to Shirley Chisholm in Brooklyn NY and part of the Museum Design Team for the Obama Presidential Center. Williams has been recognized as a USA Ford Fellow, a Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture grantee, a 3Arts Next Level awardee, and is the inaugural Artist-In-Residence at Smith College. She is a highly sought after lecturer, including a 2018 TedTalk. Amanda sits on the boards of the Graham Foundation, The Black Reconstruction Collective, and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Her work is in several permanent collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and the MoMA (NY). She has previously served as a Visiting Professor at Cornell University, Washington University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Amanda was on faculty at CCA and IIT for many years. Her projects have recently been published in ‘Black Futures’ and ‘Radical Architecture of the Future’. Amanda lives and works on the south side of Chicago.