Amanda Williams, Joan Livingstone, and Anne Wilson Named as 2025 Honorary Degree Recipients

CHICAGO—The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), a global leader in art and design education, will welcome world-renowned Chicago artist Amanda Williams to deliver the Commencement address on Monday, May 19, at the Wintrust Arena. Williams will receive an honorary doctorate alongside two SAIC professors emerit, Joan Livingstone and Anne Wilson.

Williams is a visual artist and trained architect whose work explores how race shapes the value we place on space. She has exhibited widely, with her work held in major collections including Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Art Institute of Chicago, and she is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. Livingstone is a contemporary artist, educator, curator, and author who has served as both chair of the Department of Fiber and Materials Studies and the dean of undergraduate studies at SAIC. Wilson is a visual artist who creates sculpture, material drawings, video, and performances; she has taught in SAIC’s Department of Fiber and Material Studies.

“At Commencement, we celebrate our graduating students so that they leave campus with the confidence to share their skills with the world,” said President Jiseon Lee Isbara. “Our honorary degree recipients are examples they can aspire to. When you look at Amanda Williams’s ability to make us confront the racialized aspects of our built environment, or Joan Livingstone’s and Anne Wilson’s codification of the field of fiber art through their practices as artists and educators, it is easy to be inspired.”

Since 1938, SAIC has awarded honorary degrees to an elite group of individuals who have made significant contributions to art, design, and scholarship. Past recipients include Mel Chin, Albert Oehlen, Jeff Koons (SAIC 1975–76), members of the Hairy Who, Tania Bruguera (MFA 2001), Yoko Ono, David Sedaris (BFA 1987), Theaster Gates, Patti Smith, founding members of AFRICOBRA, Marina Abramovic, Philip Glass, and Jeanne Gang.

In addition to remarks from Lee Isbara and Williams, the event will include messages from faculty, alums, and students, all in honor of the class of 2025.

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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; 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.

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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.

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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.

School of the Art Institute of Chicago
For nearly 160 years, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) has been a leader in educating the world’s most influential artists, designers, and scholars. Located in downtown Chicago with a fine arts graduate program ranked number two in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, SAIC provides an interdisciplinary approach to art and design as well as world-class resources, including the Art Institute of Chicago museum, on-campus galleries, and state-of-the-art facilities. SAIC’s undergraduate, graduate, and post-baccalaureate students have the freedom to take risks and create the bold ideas that transform Chicago and the world, and adults, teens, and kids in our Continuing Studies classes have the opportunity to explore their creative sides, build portfolios, and advance their skills. Notable alumni and faculty include Georgia O’Keeffe, Nick Cave, David Sedaris, Cynthia Rowley, Michelle Grabner, Richard Hunt, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Jeff Koons.