Amanda Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect. Her creative practice employs color as a way to draw attention to the complexities of how race shapes the ways in which we assign value to space in cities. The landscapes in which she operates are the visual residue of the invisible policies and forces that have misshapen most major US cities. Williams’ installations, 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 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, a solo exhibition at the MCA Chicago, and a public project with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. She is a 2018 USA Ford Fellow, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors grantee, an Efroymson Family Arts Fellow, a Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow and a member of the multidisciplinary Museum Design team for the Obama Presidential Center. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. Williams lives and works in Chicago.

In the spring and summer of 2021, Williams presented three bodies of work at New York City organizations. In addition to this public artwork at Storefront, they included two projects organized by The Museum of Modern Art: Embodied Sensations, a participatory artwork that considers the transformation of public space during the global pandemic, and Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, MoMA’s first ever exhibition to explore the ongoing impact of anti-black racism on the shaping of architecture and the built environment. 

Amanda Williams was selected as a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.

Website: https://awstudioart.com/

Instagram: @awstudioart