In conjunction with Monochrome Multitudes, the Smart Museum of Art and University of Chicago partners present a quarter-long artist talk series.

Join Amanda Williams and other exhibiting artists as they consider the rich and sometimes idiosyncratic references and resonances in their own work, while also speaking to the histories of the monochrome and abstraction broadly conceived.

FREE, but space is limited. Advanced registration encouraged »

Location change

In order to accommodate additional guests, we have moved the location of the event to:

Breasted Hall
Oriental Institute
1155 E. 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Amanda Williams is a visual artist who, after graduating from the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, trained as an architect at Cornell University and taught architecture at the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Her practice 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’s installations, 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 citizenship in the United States of America. Williams has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2021), the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018) in the American Pavilion co-commissioned by the University of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2020), and at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, a public commission with Andres L. Hernandez (2017). She is on the Museum Design Team for the Obama Presidential Library Center. Monochrome Multitudes will feature her Color(ed) Theory suite of photographs, which the Smart Museum acquired soon after they were made. Williams was recently awarded a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship.

Schedule

• September 29: Irena Haiduk
• October 6: Arturo Herrera
• October 13: Dan Peterman
• October 20: Sheila Hicks
• October 27: Amanda Williams
• November 3: Byron Kim
• November 17: Haegue Yang
• December 1: Tobias Rehberger

SUPPORT

Support for the Monochrome Multitudes artist lecture series has been provided by the Goethe-Institut and the following University of Chicago partners: Center for East Asian Studies, Center for Latin American Studies, Center for the Art of East Asia, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, Department of Art History, Franke Institute for the Humanities, Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts, and Wigeland Fund in the Division of the Humanities.

Image: Amanda Williams, Color(ed) Theory Series, each 2014–2016, printed 2017, Color photographs. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Purchase, The Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions and Ann E. Ziegler, 2018.9.1–7. Installation view in Take Care, 2020. Photo by Michael Tropea.