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April is National Fair Housing Month, honoring the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibits discrimination in housing, renting, and financing.

This Fair Housing Month, join us for an illuminating panel discussion on housing and racial inequality in Chicago and across the country. Moderated by National Public Housing Museum (@thenphm) Executive Director @lisayunlee, the panel includes:

• Social justice artist Tonika Lewis Johnson (@tonikaj)
• Visual artist Amanda Williams (@awstudioart)
• Author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (@keeangayamahtta)

Tickets available here: https://mycart.chicagohumanities.org/1578/1663

Tonika Lewis Johnson is a visual artist and photographer from Chicago’s South Side Englewood neighborhood. Her artistic practice explores urban segregation and documents the nuance and richness of the Black community. Johnson’s current project, Folded Map, visually investigates disparities among Chicago residents while bringing them together to have a conversation. She is a co-founder of Resident Association of Greater Englewood (R.A.G.E.), a Field Foundation Leader for a New Chicago, and a member of the City of Chicago’s Cultural Advisory Council of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. Her work has been featured at Rootwork Gallery, the Chicago Cultural Center, Harold Washington Library Center, Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA), and in the Chicago Reader. In 2017 Johnson was named Chicagoan of the Year by Chicago Magazine.

Amanda Williams is an artist who uses ideas around color and architecture to explore the intersection of race and the built environment. Through an interdisciplinary practice that brings spatial and aesthetic theory to bear on real social problems, Williams is clarifying the role of the artist in reimagining public space. Be it the latent value in vacant houses, the expansive palette of what blackness is, the speculative beauty of tulip bulbs or the social currency of childhood candies, Williams has an ongoing practice of elevating seemingly mundane objects and spaces to a renewed and often reformulated status of importance.

Her work is in several permanent collections including the MoMA, NY; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She and Olalekan B. Jefyious are co-authors of a forthcoming monument to Shirley Chisholm in Prospect Park, and a recently unveiled sculpture at the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago. Amanda serves on the boards of the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Graham Foundation, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and is a founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective. Williams is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow and most recently named a 2026 Gordon Parks fellow. Amanda received her B.Arch from Cornell University. She lives and works in Chicago.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a scholar of anti-Black racism, public policy, Black politics, radical politics and social movements. She has written three award winning books, including Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, which was a semifinalist for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation fellowships. Taylor is also a former contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Lisa Yun Lee (BA, Bryn Mawr College, Ph.D, Duke University) is a cultural activist and the executive director of the National Public Housing Museum. She is also an associate professor in Art History and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, teaching faculty with the Prison Neighborhood Art + Education Project, and a member of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials. Lisa has served as a Co-Chair of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Arts & Culture Transition Team, and on the board of the American Alliance of Museums. She is currently a board member of the Field Foundation, Illinois State Museum, 3Arts, and on the Mayor's Committee for Monuments, Memorials, and Historical Reckoning.