2016. That was the first time New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired a work by a Black designer for its architecture and design collection. The object was a stereoscopic image viewer developed by Charles Harrison. And, yes, you read that correctly: MoMA, an institution whose architecture and design department goes back to 1932, didn’t acquire a single work by a Black architect or designer until the tail end of the Obama administration.
That omission, along with the ways the museum has engaged — and not engaged — the ideas of Black architects during its history, was the subject of an illuminating essay by architectural scholar and cultural historian Mabel O. Wilson in the hefty tome “Among Others: Blackness at MoMA,” published in 2019.
“Modern architecture builds the world for the white subject, maintaining the logics of racism while also imagining a future world in which nonwhite subjects remain exploitable and marginal,” Wilson wrote in that essay. “The power of the architecture and its archive is to produce ‘whiteness’ by design.”
Now she has helped put together a MoMA exhibition that places Blackness at the heart of the show. “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,”organized by Wilson in collaboration with architecture and design associate curator Sean Anderson, unearths the ways in which systemic racism has shaped architecture and how an unexamined whiteness has served as a default in the field.
More important, the exhibition — and its very worthwhile catalog — presents myriad architectural possibilities framed by the Black experience. Among the contributors to the catalog is USC‘s architecture dean, Milton Curry, who provides a framework for architectural race theory.
“We wanted to pick people who were not only good architects, designers and artists,” Wilson says via telephone from New York, “but also had a critical perspective and could interrogate architecture, its modes of representations, its histories.”
To that end, she and Anderson commissioned 10 installations for the exhibition, which opened late last month and continues through May 31. These include a project by architect J. Yolande Daniels that surfaces Blackness in L.A.’s geography, a video work by L.A. artist David Hartt inspired by Charles Burnett’s film “Killer of Sheep” and an installation by Bay Area landscape architect Walter Hood that employs the Black Panthers’ 10-point program for proposed architectural interventions along San Pablo Avenue in Oakland.
