Amanda WilliamsUppity Negress

Amanda 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.

Amanda Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect. She was raised in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood and now lives in Bronzeville. Williams has lectured widely and published numerous articles about the relationships between art, race, and urbanism. She and artist Andres Hernandez received the Pulitzer Arts Foundation’s PXSTL public art commission in 2017. Williams has served as an Adjunct Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts in St. Louis. She was recently named to the multidisciplinary Exhibition Design team for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.