Name: 【TED】Amanda Williams: Why I turned Chicago's abandoned homes into art (Why I turned Chicago's abandoned homes into art | Amanda Williams)
Uploaded: 2019-03-20T16:03:42.000Z
Duration: 13 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

I notice it everywhere and in everything.

because I like to use colors with elusive-sounding names,

Now, if you haven't noticed, I am black, thank you --

and when you grow up in a segregated city as I have,

you're conditioned to believe that color and race can never be separate.

that somebody is not reminding you of your color.

Now, we can all agree that race is a socially constructed phenomenon,

but it's often hard to see it in our everyday existence.

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,

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 --

All these stuffy old white guys with their treatises

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.

Josef Albers posited a theory about the color red,

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

are as varied as the number of people in this room.

This color that we've all been taught since kindergarten is primary --

that I was able to see my own neighborhood as a relational context.

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.

Their cartographers were literally coloring in these maps

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

The reality is that someone else's color palettes were determining

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

What kind of painter emerges from this reality?

to connect my racialized understanding of color

with my theoretical understanding of color.

"Color(ed) Theory" was a two-year artistic project

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【TED】Amanda Williams: Why I turned Chicago's abandoned homes into art (Why I turned Chicago's abandoned homes into art | Amanda Williams)

imagine

reality

existence

permission