Abstract Leveraging the idiosyncrasies of color, architect and artist Amanda Williams's Color(ed) Theory (2014–16) experiments with form to express the kind of domestic intimacy that exists when nothing around looks like home. Over the span of three years, Williams enlisted locals to paint eight vacant homes on the South Side of Chicago a different shade inspired by the vivid and cloying colors of consumer products Williams recalls being marketed to Black Americans in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. This short reflection on Williams's artwork considers the “theory” it enacts as a study of the Black sensorium: the dynamic lateral relations that form amid displacement. In likening the tastes, textures, smells, and sounds of Black home life to echoes, what reverberates in empty space, this essay explores the resonances of Black kinship, the echo chambers that surround it, and the possibility of finding family in art and theory.
Lauren McLeod Cramer (Fri,) studied this question.