Amanda Williams: Uppity Negress

Join the Arts Club of Chicago as they present Amanda Williams: Uppity Negress as its next garden installation. Williams creates a site-specific installation for The Arts Club Garden Projects series in which she inserts a secondary fence that breaks away from the existing boundary, blurring the distinction between its function as barrier and container alike. Uppity Negress addresses the layered roles gender and race have played historically in black women’s ability to navigate their position in urban space.

Fascinated by the way the garden operates as a liminal space between public and private, Williams’s installation highlights concepts of authority and access–noting when each is granted or denied. Recent instances in contemporary culture have resurrected the term uppity to challenge the suggestion that black women have forgotten their place, or need reminding. By venturing “out of line,” the fence creates a disorienting space that calls into question the relationship between restraint and protection.

Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect. A graduate of Cornell University, and a native of Chicago's Auburn Gresham neighborhood, she is interested in how combining art and architecture might help make all parts of cities thrive. Her work spans the fields of painting, installation, and photography, and reflects the cultural relationship between color, race, and space. In addition to her visual arts practice, which includes traditional paintings, cut paper maps, and public art, Amanda has served as an Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and is currently a visiting faculty member at Washington University's Sam Fox School of Art and Design in St. Louis, Mo.

Amanda Williams: Uppity Negress opens to the public on June 17 and will close on September 23, 2017.