Amanda Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect. Raised in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood, she is best known for her series, "Color(ed) Theory," exhibited at Chicago’s inaugural Architecture Biennial, in which she painted the exterior of soon-to-be-demolished houses using a culturally charged color palette as a way to mark the pervasiveness of vacancy and blight in black 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 a highly sought after lecturer and the subject of many articles on the relationship between art, race, and urbanism. She, in collaboration with Andres Hernandez, is the recipient of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation’s 2017 PXSTL, a public art commission and has forthcoming exhibitions at the Arts Club of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Amanda was recently named to the multidisciplinary Exhibition Design team for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. She is a graduate of Cornell University’s School of Architecture, has served as an Adjunct Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Art and Design and Visual Arts in St. Louis. Amanda lives and works in Bronzeville.