“There is a history of extraction of labor within architecture, but given the last year, in terms of the social-justice reckoning, this show is now in that context, and it just kind of points to the further extraction of Black labor,” Gooden says. “So it is this group of ten artists, architects, and designers who are doing the work that the museum should have done before. In the wake of this, people are saying, ‘MoMA is putting on this show about architecture in Blackness in America.’ But no, that’s not the case; this is our labor that’s being exploited, to be quite frank about it.”
While the budget for “Reconstructions” (about $547,000) was higher than previous shows in the series (the budgets for previous shows were between $50,000 and $157,000), this reflects a bigger scope in the number of artists, since previous shows only involved five to six commissions and this show doubled that number. (“This is a complicated topic, and we wanted more than five voices in the gallery,” Wilson, one of the co-curators, explained. The curators also commissioned an original work from the photographer David Hartt, who isn’t part of the BRC.)
For the BRC, beyond the individual commission fees, what they really wanted to see at MoMA was an institutional commitment to redress its long record of exclusion. The collective suggested the museum collect more work from Black architects and launch a program to study race and architecture, something along the lines of the $10 million architecture and ecology institute MoMA announced last December. But the museum did not respond to these proposals.
