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Our mission is to preserve, promote, and propel the right of all people to a place where they can live and prosper—a place to call home.

    Resilient Hues

    A close up of several paint chips of different colors–red, yellow, blue, orange–stacked on top of each other.

    Amanda Williams, Chicago, IL, and Olalekan Jeyifous, Brooklyn, NY, 2024

    Some of the paint chips that inspired Resilient Hues.

    Installation

    • Main entrance

    • Free

    Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous blur the lines between art and architecture in their collaborative work, reimagining social spaces and examining the relationship between race, place, community, and the environment. 

    Resilient Hues draws inspiration from paint chips that the Museum collected and preserved after the last remaining residents moved out of this building, which was once part of the Jane Addams Homes. The installation shouts out the exuberance of public housing residents, many of whom decorated their apartments in vivid colors in defiance of the Chicago Housing Authority, which offered residents only a few options of paint color, such as beige and light green, if they got to decide at all. The scattered paint chips are also testimony to the painful and enduring diaspora of public housing residents displaced from their homes to make way for urban renewal, new developments, and gentrification.  

    In 2019, Williams and Jeyifous won a national competition to design the threshold to the National Public Housing Museum.

    Major funding for Resilient Hues was provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art, The Joyce Foundation, and De and Paul Gray.

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