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.

Zoë Hopkins is a writer and critic based in New York. She received her BA in Art History and African American Studies at Harvard University, and is currently working on her MA in Modern and Contemporary Art at Columbia University. Her writing has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Cultured and Hyperallergic.

Chloe Stagaman is a Brooklyn-based curator. She is Director of Programs at the Brooklyn Rail, where she works on the journal’s weekday conversation series The New Social Environment.