b'AMANDA WILLIAMS CREATIVE PRACTICE employs color as a way to draw attention to the political complexities of race, place and value in cities. The landscapes in which she operates are the visual residue of the invisible policies and forces that have misshapen most inner cities. Williams 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 America.As co-creators of Our Destiny, Our Democracya contemporary steel sculpture honoring Shirley Chisholm (19242005)Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous were awarded the inaugural com-mission for She Built NYC in April 2019. Williams and Jeyifous large-scale, three-dimensional portrait of the late politician and activist will rise in Prospect Park,35Brooklyn, New York, this year.above:Emma Chubb, Amanda Williams and Isabel Cordova 19 Amanda Williams has exhibited widely, includ-ing at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018, a solo ex-Williams said the ability to sit freely amidhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Smiths many gardens allows for much more thanand a public project with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in what might seem to be taking place on the surface.St. Louis, Missouri. She was a 2018 United States Artists She was thinking about representationtulips(USA) Ford Fellow, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters color, their shape, their texture and movement& Sculptors grant recipient, an Efroymson Family Con-but also thinking about their history as a commodity,temporary Arts Fellow and a Leadership Greater Chi-about how a flower can serve as a metaphor for the cago Fellow. She is a member of the multidisciplinary ways we value and undervalue land and territory, inmuseum design team for the Obama Presidential general, and use it to control access and wealth. Center. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Having time like thisto think, to beMuseum of Modern Art, New York and the Art Institute mindful, to look closely at everything, to be in theof Chicago. She was recently the Bill and Stephanie Sick gardenis actually really important, Williams said.Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of the Art These are the times that art is made. Institute of Chicago and previously served as a visiting assistant professor of architecture at Cornell University and Washington University in St. Louis. She lives and A version of this article first appeaed in the Smith College Grcourtworks on Chicagos South Side. Gate in July 2019. Reprinted courtesy of Stacey Schmeidel, media relations director, College Relations, Smith College.'