CANDYLADYBLACK: Amanda Williams

Visual artist who trained as an architect, Amanda Williams employs color as an operative means for drawing attention to the complex ways race informs how we assign value to the spaces we occupy. 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. Her breakthrough series, Color(ed) Theory, a set of condemned south side of Chicago houses, painted in a monochrome palette derived from racially and culturally codified color associations, was recently named by the New York Times as one of the twenty-five most significant works of postwar architecture in the world.

Writer Zoë Hopkins studies Art History and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, and Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art.

The Brooklyn Rail’s Director of Programs Chloe Stagaman is a curator working with artists in public spaces. Prior to her time at the Rail, Chloe was a public art curator in London where she collaborated with artists to deliver site-specific commissions, artist-in-residence programs, and cultural partnerships in the US and UK. Chloe has also held stints at Van Alen Institute in New York, where she created international public programs on topics in architecture and urban design, at Judd Foundation and at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Chicago. She has an M.A. in Art History with a focus on documentary photography and contemporary art from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London.