ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Amanda Williams - Visual artist
Amanda Williams blurs the distinction between art and architecture through works that employ color as a way to draw attention to the political complexities of race, place and value in cities.

Why you should listen

The landscapes in which Amanda Williams operates are the visual residue of the invisible policies and forces that have misshapen most inner cities. Her installations, paintings, video and works on paper seek to inspire new ways of looking at the familiar -- and raise questions about the state of urban space in America in the process.

Williams has exhibited widely, including the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, a solo exhibition at the MCA Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. She is a 2018 United States Artists Fellow, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors grantee, an Efroymson Family Arts Fellow, a Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow and a member of the multidisciplinary Museum Design team for the Obama Presidential Center. She is this year's Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of the Art Institute Chicago and has previously served as a visiting assistant professor of architecture at Cornell University and Washington University in St. Louis. She lives and works on Chicago's south side.

More profile about the speaker
Amanda Williams | Speaker | TED.com
TEDWomen 2018

Amanda Williams: Why I turned Chicago's abandoned homes into art

Filmed:
307,070 views

Amanda Williams shares her lifelong fascination with the complexity of color: from her experiences with race and redlining to her discovery of color theory to her work as a visual artist. Journey with Williams to Chicago's South Side and explore "Color(ed) Theory," a two-year art project in which she painted soon-to-be-demolished houses bold, monochromatic colors infused with local meaning -- catalyzing conversations and making the hidden visible.
- Visual artist
Amanda Williams blurs the distinction between art and architecture through works that employ color as a way to draw attention to the political complexities of race, place and value in cities. Full bio

Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.

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I really love color.
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I notice it everywhere and in everything.
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My family makes fun of me
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because I like to use colors
with elusive-sounding names,
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like celadon ...
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(Laughter)
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ecru ...
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carmine.
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Now, if you haven't noticed,
I am black, thank you --
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(Laughter)
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and when you grow up
in a segregated city as I have,
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like Chicago,
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you're conditioned to believe
that color and race can never be separate.
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There's hardly a day that goes by
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that somebody is not
reminding you of your color.
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Racism is my city's vivid hue.
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Now, we can all agree that race
is a socially constructed phenomenon,
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but it's often hard to see it
in our everyday existence.
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Its pervasiveness is everywhere.
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The neighborhoods I grew up in
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were filled with a kind of
culturally coded beauty.
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Major commercial corridors were lined
with brightly painted storefronts
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that competed for black consumer dollars.
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The visual mash-ups of corner stores
and beauty supply houses,
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currency exchanges,
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are where I actually, inadvertently
learned the foundational principles
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of something I would later
come to know is called color theory.
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I can remember being pretty intimidated
by this term in college --
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color theory.
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All these stuffy old white guys
with their treatises
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and obscure terminologies.
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I'd mastered each one of their
color palettes and associated principles.
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Color theory essentially boils down
to the art and science
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of using color to form
compositions and spaces.
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It's not so complicated.
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This was my bible in college.
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Josef Albers posited a theory
about the color red,
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and it always has stuck with me.
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He argues that the iconic
color of a cola can is red,
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and that in fact
all of us can agree that it's red
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but the kinds of reds that we imagine
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are as varied as the number
of people in this room.
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So imagine that.
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This color that we've all been
taught since kindergarten is primary --
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red, yellow, blue --
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in fact is not primary,
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is not irreducible,
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is not objective but quite subjective.
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What?
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(Laughter)
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Albers called this "relational."
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Relational.
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And so it was the first time
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that I was able to see my own neighborhood
as a relational context.
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Each color is affected by its neighbor.
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Each other is affected by its neighbor.
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In the 1930s,
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the United States government created
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the Federal Housing Administration,
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which in turn created a series of maps
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which were using a color-coding system
to determine which neighborhoods
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should and should not receive
federal housing loans.
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Their residential security map
was its own kind of color palette,
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and in fact was more influential
than all of those color palettes
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that I had been studying
in college combined.
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Banks would not lend to people
who lived in neighborhoods like mine.
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That's me in D86.
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Their cartographers
were literally coloring in these maps
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and labeling that color "hazardous."
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Red was the new black,
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and black neighborhoods were colored.
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The problem persists today,
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and we've seen it most recently
in the foreclosure crisis.
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In Chicago, this is best
symbolized by these Xs
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that are emblazoned
on the fronts of vacated houses
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on the South and West Side.
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The reality is that someone else's
color palettes were determining
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my physical and artistic existence.
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Ridiculous.
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I decided that I'd create
my own color palette
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and speak to the people
who live where I do
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and alter the way
that color had been defined for us.
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It was a palette that I didn't
have to search far for
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and look for in a treatise,
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because I already knew it.
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What kind of painter
emerges from this reality?
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What color is urban?
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What color is ghetto?
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What color is privilege?
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What color is gang-related?
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What color is gentrification?
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What color is Freddie Gray?
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What color is Mike Brown?
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Finally, I'd found a way
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to connect my racialized
understanding of color
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with my theoretical
understanding of color.
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And I gave birth to my third baby:
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"Color(ed) Theory."
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(Laughter)
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"Color(ed) Theory"
was a two-year artistic project
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in which I applied my own color palette
to my own neighborhoods
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in my own way.
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Now, if I walked down
79th Street right now
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and I asked 50 people for the name
of the slightly greener shade of cyan,
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they would look at me sideways.
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(Laughter)
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But if I say, "What color
is Ultra Sheen?" --
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oh, a smile emerges,
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stories about their
grandmother's bathroom ensue.
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I mean, who needs turquoise
when you have Ultra Sheen?
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Who needs teal when you have Ultra Sheen?
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Who needs ultramarine when you have ...
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(Audience) Ultra Sheen.
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(Laughter)
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This is exactly how I derived my palette.
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I would ask friends and family
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and people with backgrounds
that were similar to mine
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for those stories and memories.
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The stories weren't always happy
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but the colors always resonated
more than the product itself.
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I took those theories to the street.
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"Ultra Sheen."
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"Pink Oil Moisturizer."
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If you're from Chicago,
"Harold's Chicken Shack."
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(Laughter)
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"Currency Exchange + Safe Passage."
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"Flamin' Red Hots."
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"Loose Squares" ...
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and "Crown Royal Bag."
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I painted soon-to-be-demolished homes
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in a much-maligned area called Englewood.
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We'd gather up as much paint
as I could fit in my trunk,
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I'd call my most trusted art homies,
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my amazing husband always by my side,
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and we'd paint every inch of the exteriors
in monochromatic fashion.
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I wanted to understand scale
in a way that I hadn't before.
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I wanted to apply the colors
to the biggest canvas I could imagine ...
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houses.
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So I'd obsessively drive up and down
familiar streets that I'd grown up on,
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I'd cross-reference these houses
with the city's data portal
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to make sure that they'd been
tagged for demolition --
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unsalvageable, left for dead.
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I really wanted to understand
what it meant to just let color rule,
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to trust my instincts,
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to stop asking for permission.
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No meetings with city officials,
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no community buy-in,
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just let color rule
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in my desire to paint
different pictures about the South Side.
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These houses sit in stark contrast
to their fully lined counterparts.
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We'd paint to make them stand out
like Monopoly pieces
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in these environments.
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And we'd go on these early Sunday mornings
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and keep going until we ran out
of that paint or until someone complained.
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"Hey, did you paint that?"
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a driver asked as I was taking
this image one day.
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Me, nervously:
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"Yes?"
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His face changed.
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"Aw, I thought Prince was coming."
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(Laughter)
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He had grown up on this block,
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and so you could imagine
when he drove past
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and saw one of its last remaining houses
mysteriously change colors overnight,
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it was clearly not
a Crown Royal bag involved,
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it was a secret beacon from Prince.
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(Laughter)
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And though that block
was almost all but erased,
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it was the idea that Prince
could pop up in unexpected places
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and give free concerts in areas
that the music industry and society
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had deemed were not valuable anymore.
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For him,
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the idea that just the image of this house
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was enough to bring Prince there
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meant that it was possible.
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In that moment,
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that little patch of Eggleston
had become synonymous with royalty.
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And for however briefly,
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Eric Bennett's neighborhood
had regained its value.
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So we traded stories
despite being strangers
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about which high school we'd gone to
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and where we'd grown up,
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and Mrs. So-and-so's candy store --
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of being kids on the South Side.
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And once I revealed
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that in fact this project had
absolutely nothing to do with Prince,
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Eric nodded in seeming agreement,
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and as we parted ways and he drove off,
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he said, "But he could still come!"
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(Laughter)
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He had assumed
full ownership of this project
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and was not willing to relinquish it,
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even to me, its author.
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That, for me, was success.
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I wish I could tell you that this project
transformed the neighborhood
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and all the indices
that we like to rely on:
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increased jobs,
reduced crime, no alcoholism --
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but in fact it's more gray than that.
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"Color(ed) Theory"
catalyzed new conversations
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about the value of blackness.
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"Color(ed) Theory" made unmistakably
visible the uncomfortable questions
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that institutions and governments
have to ask themselves
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about why they do what they do.
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They ask equally difficult questions
of myself and my neighborhood counterparts
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about our value systems
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and what our path
to collective agency needs to be.
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Color gave me freedom in a way
that didn't wait for permission
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or affirmation or inclusion.
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Color was something that I could rule now.
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One of the neighborhood members
and paint crew members said it best
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when he said, "This didn't
change the neighborhood,
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it changed people's perceptions about
what's possible for their neighborhood,"
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in big and small ways.
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Passersby would ask me,
"Why are you painting that house
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when you know the city's just going
to come and tear it down?"
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At the time, I had no idea,
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I just knew that I had to do something.
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I would give anything to better
understand color as both a medium
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and as an inescapable way
that I am identified in society.
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If I have any hope
of making the world better,
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I have to love and leverage
both of these ways that I'm understood,
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and therein lies the value and the hue.
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Thank you.
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(Applause and cheers)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Amanda Williams - Visual artist
Amanda Williams blurs the distinction between art and architecture through works that employ color as a way to draw attention to the political complexities of race, place and value in cities.

Why you should listen

The landscapes in which Amanda Williams operates are the visual residue of the invisible policies and forces that have misshapen most inner cities. Her installations, paintings, video and works on paper seek to inspire new ways of looking at the familiar -- and raise questions about the state of urban space in America in the process.

Williams has exhibited widely, including the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, a solo exhibition at the MCA Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. She is a 2018 United States Artists Fellow, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors grantee, an Efroymson Family Arts Fellow, a Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow and a member of the multidisciplinary Museum Design team for the Obama Presidential Center. She is this year's Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of the Art Institute Chicago and has previously served as a visiting assistant professor of architecture at Cornell University and Washington University in St. Louis. She lives and works on Chicago's south side.

More profile about the speaker
Amanda Williams | Speaker | TED.com