On February 27th, The Museum of Modern Art opened the fourth installment of their Issues in Contemporary Architecture series ? Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America. The exhibit, along with its accompanying publication, examines the intersections of architecture, Blackness and anti-Black racism, as well as contemporary architecture in the context of how systemic racism has fostered violent histories of discrimination and injustice in the U.S.
Reconstructions: Blackness and Architecture in America
The ten commissioned projects in the exhibit take a look at how people have mobilized Black cultural spaces, forms and practices as sites of imagination, resistance and refusal. Emanuel Admassu, Germane Barnes, Sekou Cooke, J. Yolande Daniels, Felecia Davis, Mario Gooden, Walter Hood, Olalekan Jeyifous, V. Mitch McEwen and Amanda Williams respond to narratives and conditions. The architects, designers and artists involved each focused in on Atlanta, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, New Orleans, Oakland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Syracuse through their individual projects. The exhibit also presents David Hartt’s new film, On Exactitude in Science (Watts), which looks to the dimensions of Black life and spaces in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Horizontal Desk, Emanuel Admassu
The accompanying publication includes essays by the curators, the advisory committee and invited scholars, as well as new photographs by artist David Hartt, commissioned f...