Three MacArthur Fellows on Housing Justice
Visual artist Tonika Lewis Johnson, architect Amanda Williams, and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor illuminate systemic housing discrimination and paths toward justice.
Why we picked this
Three MacArthur Fellows, three different disciplines, one argument: the housing system isn't broken—it's working exactly as designed, to concentrate wealth and exclude everyone else.
Three MacArthur Fellows working in three different disciplines—visual art, architecture, and academic scholarship—come together to examine racial inequality in housing from the angles their work gives them. What connects them is the argument that housing discrimination is not incidental but structural, and that understanding it requires looking at how aesthetics, policy, and history reinforce each other.
Tonika Lewis Johnson is a photographer and visual artist from Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood whose work makes the geometry of racial segregation visible. Amanda Williams is an architect whose practice uses color and the built environment to interrogate race; her work is held by MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a Princeton scholar and author of Race for Profit, a Pulitzer Prize finalist examining how the federal government’s post-redlining housing programs continued to extract wealth from Black communities.
Moderated by Lisa Yun Lee, Executive Director of the National Public Housing Museum. Note that general admission tickets have sold out; the CHI website may have waiting list options. Part of the Bridgeport festival day.