Casey Kaplan
An Oral History with Amanda Williams
By Lauren Halsey | June 7, 2025
Amanda Williams, a visual artist and an architect by training, is interviewed by Lauren Halsey, her mentee-turned-visual artist peer. Williams’s use of the architectural medium as a vehicle to find her own language for talking about making both conceptual and physical spaces has become foundational to her practice. Williams and Halsey’s candid conversation journeys through the changing neighborhoods of the South Side of Chicago and South-Central Los Angeles, underscoring the devastating impact of redlining and gentrification and the erasure of Black and working-class cultural landmarks. Williams notes her experience at Cornell University and the support she received from working alongside Black and Brown classmates equally invested in transcending institutional racism. In session one, Williams and Halsey unpack the significance of exploration and mentorship, and the ways that they stay grounded to their communities and in their practice. Session two is a blunt analysis of how both artists find freedom in and through their work and make use of Hip-Hop on their journeys to finding their funk. Williams’s story merges her theoretical and practical concepts of Black spatial practice while colorfully reimagining how we might occupy past and future histories. This offering from Williams and Halsey is unique because they possess the rare ability and skill to make architecture that is both real and imagined. As Williams says of the duo, “We make space, and we make spaces!”
—Janée A Moses, Director of the Oral History Project
Lauren Halsey
Good morning. By the way, we should start with our history and how we met at California College of the Arts (CCA). You were an architecture professor, and I was a transfer student who didn’t know what the fuck was going on, coming from El Camino Community College where I was learning how to use a drafting table. The most conceptual aspect of the curriculum was translating our designs into micro architectures that we would build in the construction field, but very muted. So fast forward, I meet you at CCA with brilliant staff, brilliant students. And I must say, I often wonder—not in an emo way, or a mad way—what my trajectory would have been in the architecture-with-a-capital-A field had you taught me. Because you were in the studio adjacent to me. Remember? You were teaching studio.
Amanda Williams
That’s right. You weren’t my student. You were with “the black guy.” (laughter)
LH
By seeing you, a Black woman in the field, would I have felt empowered to finish? You come from a place like where I’m from. I was encouraged by my professor to leave CCA. The assessment was that it wasn’t for me, which is fine. I’m not holding a grudge. But I often wonder . . .
AW
That’s interesting to hear. In my mind, you were my student, and it also was an offshoot of my mission to support pretty much any Brown and Black student. I do remember coming over for desk crits, and saying, at least to myself, All these kids have to stay. I can remember you just constantly questioning, “Am I supposed to be here?” And I was like, “Yes, you are supposed to be here; this is where you belong!” I would never say that someone doesn’t belong because the stakes are too high. It’s incumbent upon us to make sure that everybody makes it through, even if they aren’t immediately qualified. There’s a lot of other people that get through these programs who have no business getting through. I think that’s interesting, especially because when we did the talk for you at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), I said that architecture couldn’t hold you. You were too big for architecture. Your vision was too expansive. The great Mabel O. Wilson was the first person that put that idea into my head that anybody who’s not practicing architecture in a traditional way is probably doing it right.
Photo: Amanda Williams in her studio, 2024. Photo by Brian Crawford. Courtesy of the artist.