Talk | Roundtable on Faith Ringgold

Jamal Cyrus’ (born 1973, Houston, TX) expansive practice draws on the languages of collage and assemblage, and explores the evolution of African American identity within Black political movements and the African diaspora. He is engaged with an aesthetic practice that aims to transform the most mundane materials into objects with rich, densely packed networks of meaning and purpose.

Cyrus received his BFA from the University of Houston in 2004 and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. He has won several prestigious awards, including most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship (2023). Cyrus was awarded the Driskell Prize, (High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA) in 2020. The artist’s mid-career survey, The End of My Beginning, opened at the Blaffer Museum of Art in 2021 before continuing on to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Mississippi Museum of Art. Cyrus was also a member of the artist collective Otabenga Jones and Associates, active from 2002 to 2017.

Amanda Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect. Her creative 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, sculptures, paintings, and works on paper seek to inspire new ways of looking at the familiar and, in the process, raise questions about the inequitable state of urban space and ownership in America. Her breakthrough series Color(ed) Theory, a set of condemned South Side of Chicago houses, painted in a monochrome palette derived from racially and culturally codified color associations, has been named by the New York Times one of the 25 most significant works of postwar architecture in the world. Her ongoing painting series, What Black Is This You Say? is an exhaustive visual tome on the elusive nature of ‘black’ as a color and racialized identity.

Amanda has exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Hammer Museum to name a few. She serves as a board member for the Terra Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, the Garfield Park Conservatory and the Hyde Park Art Center. She is also co-founder of the Black Reconstruction Collective. Her work is in several permanent collections including the MoMA, the MCA, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian. Amanda is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and recently named a Chicagoan of the Year by Chicago Magazine. She lives and works in Chicago.