Amanda Williams

(b. 1974)

Amanda Williams’s spatial interventions draw on histories of modern design and vernacular color to provoke reflection on race, citizenship, and urban life. Growing up in Chicago and attending the University of Chicago Lab Schools, Williams made her career on the South Side. For her project Color(ed) Theory (2014–16), which featured in her first solo show at the MCA Chicago in 2017, Williams repainted eight condemned houses in Englewood in colors drawn from commercial products that were marketed to Black consumers, including Harold’s Chicken, Pink Oil hair moisturizer, and Newport cigarettes. Her 2022 project, Redefining Redlining, was a community effort to plant over 100,000 red tulips in Washington Park. Trained as an architect and a former faculty member at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture, Williams was chosen in 2017 to join the Obama Presidential Center’s exhibition design team.