Honorary Degrees

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, clarifying the role of the artist in reimagining public space. 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 as one of the 25 most significant works of postwar architecture in the world. Williams has exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; and the Hammer Museum, among others. Her work is in several permanent collections including the MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. Williams has been widely recognized, most recently being named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.

Joan Livingstone is a contemporary artist, educator, curator, and author based in Chicago who creates sculptural objects, installations, prints, and collages that reference the human body and bodily experience. Her works reside in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Honolulu Museum of Art. She is the co-editor of the MIT Press book The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production. For her work, Livingstone has received the Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship, Virginia A. Groot Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Artist Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. A professor emerit of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she has served as both chair of the Department of Fiber and Materials Studies and the dean of undergraduate studies.

Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist who creates sculpture, material drawings, video, and performances that are grounded in a textile language. Her artworks reside in permanent collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Detroit Institute of Arts; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Foundation Toms Pauli, Lausanne, Switzerland; and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. Wilson was named a 2015 United States Artists Distinguished Fellow and is the recipient of awards from the American Craft Council (2024 Gold Medal), Renwick Alliance (2022 Distinguished Educators Award), Textile Society of America, Artadia, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, National Association of Schools of Art and Design, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wilson is a professor emerit in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.