Seeing the Unseen: Color as Currency
Part of the 2024 GIA Conference Blog
Rachel Dukes
This work is important. This work is transformational. This work has real impact on communities.
2024 marks 10 years since Chicago-based artist Amanda Williams received substantial funding to support her career as an artist. The Day 1 keynote speaker walked us through her journey from what her father referred to as a “good government job” working at an architecture firm in San Francisco to now as an artist creating work that tackles housing discrimination as local as her own home on Chicago’s southwest side. The projects that she discussed were made possible because of the support of funders in the room who created grants and funding opportunities for her to bring a series of questions regarding housing to the communities that are impacted most. Her speech was about connecting grantmakers with the artists whose projects they are funding and providing grantmakers with insights into the process and the full impact of their support. What better way to excite conference attendees about the possibilities that come from new strategies in grantmaking?
A native Chicagoan, Williams recognized the impact of what she referred to as the “invisible residue of policies” that have impacted primarily Black and Brown communities. Having lived in impacted neighborhoods and seeing it first hand, as an artist and a resident, she discussed two projects that “underscore this idea of artists oftentimes pursuing a compulsion or a question before they’re able to formulate what it is that they’re actually doing.”
The Color(ed) Theory Suite used eight distinct colors from products and brands such as Flamin’ Red Hots and Pink Oil Moisturizer, as a vehicle to ignite a memory, evoke an emotion, and help people in the area see and recognize cultural, physical, economic, and architectural currency as dually valuable and beautiful. She painted eight homes slated for demolition with these colors ubiquitous in Black culture, and over the next four years all eight of those homes were demolished. This project gave her a different perspective on the idea of the power a project holds. “So many of us imagine that artists sit and sketch a cafe and come up with an idea and execute it,” she explains, “we ask questions constantly and learn how to express what the question is or what the answer or the proposal should be.” As she witnessed the slow process of the home's demolition, a new set of questions spilled that eventually led her to the Redefining Redlining project.
Through Redefining Redlining, Williams explored the transformation of Chicago’s Washington Park neighborhood, a once thriving community that is now filled with dozens of vacant lots that have been deemed hazardous. In these lots, to visualize the impact redlining which is defined as the refusal of a loan because the area where a person lives has been deemed hazardous, she, along with a slew of neighbors, family, friends, and volunteers, planted 100,000 red tulip bulbs to represent the value of the homes that should exist in the nearly two dozen vacant lots where homes and businesses once stood.
“It took nearly two decades to understand that I already was seeing everything that I needed to see in order to really express to everyone else in the world what we already knew about.” Encouraging artists to ask questions, to constantly ideate and create, allowed for the translation of difficult concepts to communities in Chicago that certainly apply to cities across the country and the world- a true testament to the power of funding artists and providing the space for their work to come to life.
ABOUT THE KEYNOTE
Amanda Williams shares her practice - exploring how race shapes the value we assign to the spaces we occupy. Through her installations, sculptures, paintings, and works on paper, we are challenged to see the familiar in new ways and confront the inequities in urban space and ownership in America. From Chicago to NYC and New Orleans, Williams will demonstrate the power of public art and Black creativity in shaping our environments.
