Black Aesthetics and Theory
[action=query] Bibliography by Kristen Owens (Pace Gallery; February 1, 2023)
"This bibliography is the result of research into Pace Gallery's history exhibiting, representing, and/or collaborating with Black artists, scholars, and activists."
Abolition Geography by ISBN: 9781839761706Publication Date: 2022-05-10"Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present."
VIDEO: Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (16 min)
A short film interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore for Antipode Foundation
The Aesthetics of Equity by ISBN: 9780816646616Publication Date: 2007-10-26"A provocative examination of how and why African Americans have been excluded from the study and practice of architecture.
Architecture is often thought to be a diary of a society, filled with symbolic representations of specific cultural moments. However, as Craig L. Wilkins observes, that diary includes far too few narratives of the diverse cultures in U.S. society. In The Aesthetics of Equity, Wilkins states that the discipline of architecture has a resistance to African Americans at every level."
Architecture in Black by ISBN: 9781350009875Publication Date: 2016-09-22"Based on analysis of historical, philosophical, and semiotic texts, Architecture in Black presents a systematic examination of the theoretical relationship between architecture and blackness. Now updated, this original study draws on a wider range of case studies, highlighting the racial techniques that can legitimize modern historicity, philosophy and architectural theory."
Art on My Mind by ISBN: 9781565842632Publication Date: 1995-07-01"In Art on My Mind, bell hooks, a leading cultural critic, responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting, and criticizing art and aesthetics in an art world increasingly concerned with identity politics. Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community. For this collection, hooks has written thirteen new pieces, which complement her authoritative essays on Lorna Simpson, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Featured among the new pieces are interviews with and critiques of the works of Alison Saar, Carrie Mae Weems, Emma Amos, LaVerne Wells-Bowie and Margo Humphreys, as well as essays on photography, architecture, and the representation of black male bodies." Of particular interest is the essay, "Architecture and Black Life: Talking Space with Laverne Wells-Bowie" and "Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice" included in this book.
Black Geographies and the Politics of Place by ISBN: 9781897071236Publication Date: 2007-04-12"Black Geographies is an interdisciplinary collection of essays in black geographic theory. Fourteen authors address specific geographic sites and develop their geopolitical relevance with regards to race, uneven geographies, and resistance.
Multi-faceted and erudite, Black Geographies brings into focus the politics of place that black subjects, communities, and philosophers inhabit. Highlights include essays on the African diaspora and its interaction with citizenship and nationalism, critical readings of the blues and hip-hop, and thorough deconstructions of Nova Scotian and British Columbian black topography. Drawing on historical, contemporary, and theoretical black geographies from the USA, the Caribbean, and Canada, these essays provide an exploration of past and present black spatial theories and experiences."
Black in Place by ISBN: 9781469654010Publication Date: 2019-11-25"While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as “Chocolate City,” it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor. In this book, Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.C.’s shift to a “post-chocolate” cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street’s economic and racial developments. In doing so, she offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital. Summers focuses on the continuing significance of blackness in a place like the nation’s capital, how blackness contributes to our understanding of contemporary urbanization, and how it laid an important foundation for how Black people have been thought to exist in cities. Summers also analyzes how blackness—as a representation of diversity—is marketed to sell a progressive, “cool,” and authentic experience of being in and moving through an urban center.Using a mix of participant observation, visual and media analysis, interviews, and archival research, Summers shows how blackness has become a prized and lucrative aesthetic that often excludes D.C.’s Black residents."
The Black Skyscraper by ISBN: 9781421429038Publication Date: 2019-05-07"With the development of the first skyscrapers in the 1880s, urban built environments could expand vertically as well as horizontally. Tall buildings emerged in growing cities to house and manage the large and racially diverse populations of migrants and immigrants flocking to their centers following Reconstruction. Beginning with Chicago's early 10-story towers and concluding with the 1931 erection of the 102-story Empire State Building, Adrienne Brown's The Black Skyscraper provides a detailed account of how scale and proximity shape our understanding of race. Over the next half-century, as city skylines grew, American writers imagined the new urban backdrop as an obstacle to racial differentiation. Examining works produced by writers, painters, architects, and laborers who grappled with the early skyscraper's outsized and disorienting dimensions, Brown explores this architecture's effects on how race was seen, read, and sensed at the turn of the twentieth century. In lesser-known works of apocalyptic science fiction, light romance, and Jazz Age melodrama, as well as in more canonical works by W. E. B. Du Bois, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aaron Douglas, and Nella Larsen, the skyscraper mediates the process of seeing and being seen as a racialized subject. From its distancing apex reducing bodies to specks o the shadowy mega-blocks it formed at street level, the skyscraper called attention, Brown argues, to the malleable nature of perception. A highly interdisciplinary work, The Black Skyscraper reclaims the influence of race on modern architectural design as well as the less-well-understood effects these designs had on the experience and perception of race."
Building Character by ISBN: 9780822966821Publication Date: 2021-09-14"In the nineteenth-century paradigm of architectural organicism, the notion that buildings possessed character provided architects with a lens for relating the buildings they designed to the populations they served. Advances in scientific race theory enabled designers to think of “race” and “style” as manifestations of natural law: just as biological processes seemed to inherently regulate the racial characters that made humans a perfect fit for their geographical contexts, architectural characters became a rational product of design. Parallels between racial and architectural characters provided a rationalist model of design that fashioned some of the most influential national building styles of the past, from the pioneering concepts of French structural rationalism and German tectonic theory to the nationalist associations of the Chicago Style, the Prairie Style, and the International Style. In Building Character, Charles Davis traces the racial charge of the architectural writings of five modern theorists—Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William Lescaze—to highlight the social, political, and historical significance of the spatial, structural, and ornamental elements of modern architectural styles."
VIDEO Lecture: “Cannon Fodder: Debating the Racial Politics of Canonicity in Modern Architectural History” by Charles L. Davis (at Harvard Graduate School of Design; October 6, 2020; 1 hr 26 min )
"This talk introduces audiences to the antiracist framework for architectural history that guided the formulation of the recent monograph Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style (2020). This revisionist intellectual history recovers the ways that architectural organicism provided a rationalist model of design to consciously relate the perceived racial and architectural “characters” of a nation to the people they served. From the ethnographic histories of style penned by Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Gottfried Semper, to Louis Sullivan’s Chicago Style, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style, and William Lescaze’s organic interpretation of international style public housing, modern architects were heavily invested in biological and ethnographic interpretations of individual and national identity. Using textual and physical case studies, this research demonstrates one way of revising our understanding of the western canon to account for the role of racial ideas."
VIDEO Lecture: "Playing Against Type: Race, Space and Domesticity on Buffalo's East Side" by Charles L. Davis (at Harvard Graduate School of Design; October 9, 2020; 1 hr 25min)
"As a follow-up to last evening’s lecture “Cannon Fodder: Debating the Racial Politics of Canonicity in Modern Architectural History,” the Architecture Department will be hosting “Playing Against Type: Race, Space and Domesticity on Buffalo’s East Side.” The talk will feature a presentation by Charles L. Davis on his work, Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style, followed by a conversation with GSD faculty member Lisa Haber-Thomson."
VIDEO Lecture: Race, Style and Ideologies of National Character by Charles L. Davis II (Birkbeck, University of London; March 12, 2020; 1 hr 32 min)
"In the nineteenth-century paradigm of architectural organicism, the notion that buildings possessed character provided architects with a lens for relating the buildings they designed to the populations they served. Advances in scientific race theory enabled designers to think of “race” and “style” as empirical manifestations of natural law. Parallels between racial and architectural characters provided a rationalist model of design that fashioned some of the most influential national building styles of the past, from the pioneering concepts of French structural rationalism and German tectonic theory to the nationalist associations of the Chicago Style, the Prairie Style, and the International Style. In the final talk in our Autumn 2020 programme, Charles L. Davis II traces the racial discourses inherent in the architectural writings and buildings of five modern theorists—Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William Lescaze."
Dark Space by ISBN: 9781941332139Publication Date: 2016-02-23"This collection of essays by architect Mario Gooden investigates the construction of African American identity and representation through the medium of architecture. These five texts move between history, theory, and criticism to explore a discourse of critical spatial practice engaged in the constant reshaping of the African Diaspora. African American cultural institutions designed and constructed in recent years often rely on cultural stereotypes, metaphors, and clichés to communicate significance, demonstrating "Africanisms" through form and symbolism—but there is a far richer and more complex heritage to be explored. Presented here is a series of questions that interrogate and illuminate other narratives of "African American architecture," and reveal compelling ways of translating the philosophical idea of the African Diaspora's experience into space."
Diversity and Design by ISBN: 9781138023178Publication Date: 2015-10-16"Diversity and Design explores how design - whether of products, buildings, landscapes, cities, media, or systems - affects diverse members of society. Fifteen case studies in television, marketing, product design, architecture, film, video games, and more, illustrate the profound, though often hidden, consequences design decisions and processes have on the total human experience. The book not only investigates how gender, race, class, age, disability, and other factors influence the ways designers think, but also emphasizes the importance of understanding increasingly diverse cultures and, thus, averting design that leads to discrimination, isolation, and segregation." Of particular note are the first three essays in Part 1: Race and Ethnicity."
Hip-Hop Architecture by ISBN: 9781350116153Publication Date: 2021-04-22"Despite increasing popular attention to issues of diversity and under-representation in architecture, power and control within the profession remain in the hands of white men. Of all the creative forms, architecture remains the least accessible to the inhabitants of deprived urban neighborhoods. The absence of a significant minority presence in the field reinforces the disconnect between designers and users. But things are changing. Hip-Hop Architecture explores the production of spaces, buildings, and urban environments that embody the creative energies in hip-hop. It is a newly expanding design philosophy which sees architecture as a distinct part of hip hop's cultural expression, and which uses hip-hop as a lens through which to provoke new architectural ideas. The book begins by outlining an architectural manifesto - the voice of the underrepresented, marginalized, and voiceless within the discipline, practice, and profession. Subsequent chapters explain what constitutes hip hop architecture today, exploring its historical antecedents and its theory, and placing it in a wider context both within architecture and within Black and African American movements. Throughout, the work is illustrated with inspirational case studies of architectural projects and creative practices, and interspersed with interludes and interviews with key architects, designers, and academics in the field. This is a vital and provocative work that can appeal to architects, students, designers, theorists and anyone interested in a fresh view of architecture, race and culture."
VIDEO Lecture: MoMA Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America/Black Reconstruction Collective (May 4, 2021; 2 hrs 1 min)
In conjunction with the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at The Museum of Modern Art, the museum held a two-part public event: A conversation with Dean Milton S. F. Curry and the exhibition organizers, followed by a presentation and discussion with the exhibitors. The event will highlight ongoing research that comments on and questions how gentrification and displacement, industry, technology, and other forces affect African Americans and People of Color in the built environment. This program is presented in collaboration with the USC School of Architecture. Part I. The conversation on the exhibit: Milton S. F. Curry, dean of USC Architecture and the exhibition organizers, Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, and Mabel O. Wilson, Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor, Columbia University. Part II. The presentation by the Black Reconstruction Collective (the exhibitors): Emanuel Admassu, Germane Barnes, Sekou Cooke, J. Yolande Daniels, Felecia Ann Davis, Walter Hood, Mario Gooden, Olalekan Jeyifous, V. Mitch McEwen, and Amanda Williams.
ONLINE COURSE: Reimagining Blackness and Architecture
What does it mean to create and occupy space? In this new online course, you’ll hear directly from artists, architects, and scholars who explore the ways Blackness has shaped architecture and the built environment.
Notes Toward a History of Black Landscape Architecture by Kofi Boone (Places Journal; October 2020)
"What if we started to tell different stories about landscape architecture, stories that recognized the power of physical places in catalyzing political and economic transformation?"
Paths to Prison by ISBN: 9781941332665Publication Date: 2020-09-07"As Angela Y. Davis has proposed, the "path to prison," which so disproportionately affects communities of color, is most acutely guided by the conditions of daily life. Architecture, then, as fundamental to shaping these conditions of civil existence, must be interrogated for its involvement along this diffuse and mobile path. Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality aims to expand the ways the built environment's relationship to and participation in the carceral state is understood in architecture. The collected essays in this book implicate architecture in the more longstanding and pervasive legacies of racialized coercion in the United States--and follow the premise that to understand how the prison enacts its violence in the present one must shift the epistemological frame elsewhere: to places, discourses, and narratives assumed to be outside of the sphere of incarceration. Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality offers not a fixed or inexorable account of how things are but rather a set of starting points and methodologies for reevaluating the architecture of carceral society and for undoing it altogether. With contributions by Adrienne Brown, Stephen Dillon, Jarrett M. Drake, Sable Elyse Smith, James Graham, Leslie Lodwick, Dylan Rodriguez, Anne Spice, Brett Story, Jasmine Syedullah, Mabel O. Wilson, and Wendy L. Wright."
Race and Modern Architecture by ISBN: 9780822966593Publication Date: 2020-07-28"Although race-a concept of human difference that establishes hierarchies of power and domination-has played a critical role in the development of modern architectural discourse and practice since the Enlightenment, its influence on the discipline remains largely underexplored. This volume offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century. Challenging us to write race back into architectural history, contributors confront how racial thinking has intimately shaped some of the key concepts of modern architecture and culture over time, including freedom, revolution, character, national and indigenous style, progress, hybridity, climate, representation, and radicalism. By analyzing how architecture has intersected with histories of slavery, colonialism, and inequality-from eighteenth-century neoclassical governmental buildings to present-day housing projects for immigrants-'Race and Modern Architecture' challenges, complicates, and revises the standard association of modern architecture with a universal project of emancipation and progress."
Race and Real Estate by ISBN: 9780199977277Publication Date: 2015-10-28"Race and Real Estate' brings together new work by architects, sociologists, legal scholars, and literary critics that qualifies and complicates traditional narratives of race, property, and citizenship in the United States. Rather than simply rehearsing the standard account of how blacks were historically excluded from homeownership, these authors of the essays explore how the raced history of property affects understandings of home and citizenship."
The Space of Social Equity by ISBN: 9780815369752Publication Date: 2018-12-13"Gage proposes a dramatic realignment between aesthetic thought, politics, social equality and the design of our physical world. He sets out to reconfigure a more encompassing social theory of how humanity perceives its very reality and how it might begin to more justly define that reality through new ways of reconsidering the built environment."
Torkwase Dyson by ISBN: 9780989606981Publication Date: 2021-09-01"Published on the occasion of the exhibition Torkwase Dyson, presented at Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg in Derneburg, Germany, 2021.
Featuring newly translated texts by the artist and in conversation with Arthur Jafa and Mabel O. Wilson."
Black Interiority: Notes on Architecture, Infrastructure, Environmental Justice and Abstract Draw by Torkwase Dyson
"This essay was first published in January 2017 by the online publication Pelican Bomb. It was also published in Torkwase Dyson: Works from the Hall Collection (Hall Art Foundation, 2021)."