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