Spotlight on Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America
Sekou Cooke, one of the featured designers in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition, speaks with ENTER about the show and the collective that grew out of it
By Ann Mayhew | March 25, 2021
Felecia Davis, Fabricating Networks: Transmissions and Receptions from Pittsburgh’s Hill District, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
SPOTLIGHT
Last month, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City opened a new exhibition that challenges its own history and the history of Western architecture. Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, which runs through May 31, features newly commissioned projects by 10 Black architects, designers, and artists that examine architecture in the context of Blackness and systemic racism; it also invites a new understanding of what architecture is and imagines a future in which architecture is a vehicle for Black liberation and joy.
Curated by Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson with Arièle Dionne-Krosnick and Anna Burckhardt, this fourth installment of the Issues in Contemporary Architecture series includes projects by Emanuel Admassu, Germane Barnes, Sekou Cooke, J. Yolande Daniels, Felecia Davis, Mario Gooden, Walter Hood, Olalekan Jeyifous, V. Mitch McEwen, and Amanda Williams, and features a video by David Hartt.
Sekou Cooke speaking at the opening of Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture at SpringBox in St. Paul in 2019. Photo by Chad Holder.
Sekou Cooke is the curator and designer of Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, which was brought to St. Paul in 2019 by the local architecture firm 4RM+ULA and AIA St. Paul, in collaboration with Springboard for the Arts, MSP NOMA, and Knight Foundation. Cooke’s Reconstructions piece, “We Outchea: Hip-Hop Fabrications and Public Space,” is an expansion of his work in hip-hop architecture into urbanism and urban history. The project preemptively critiques and reimagines Blueprint 15 in Syracuse, New York, a proposed mixed-income development that will displace and disrupt Black residents in the city’s 15th Ward, which was historically devalued when Interstate 81 was built through the neighborhood in the 1960s.
“It’s a story about Syracuse, but it’s a story that is reflected across all these other cities in the country,” says Cooke, noting the similarity of the 15th Ward’s history to that of St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood, which was torn apart by the construction of I-94. “So, it’s really a story about Blackness in America.”
Sekou Cooke, We Outchea: Hip-Hop Fabrications and Public Space, 2020. Digital print and screenprint. Image courtesy of the artist. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The field guide for Reconstructions (see below) describes how “We Outchea emphasizes the historical layers of the site by allowing demolished buildings to interface with, subtract from, and attach to the proposed new development,” creating public spaces and spotlighting images from the 15th Ward at the height of its affluence.
“The connection to hip-hop,” Cooke explains, “is making use of hip-hop’s power to uncover lost histories, things that were there before that we might have forgotten or didn’t see in a previous light. And then bringing that back to the surface, remixing it, layering it on top of other things, layering the old with the new and creating something that is empowering.”
The commissioned works for Reconstructions are speculative, making the exhibition much more than just an exhibit in New York City. As Cooke points out, “the possibility or impossibility of [the projects] is not really relevant. What’s relevant are the embedded ideas.”
Olalekan Jeyifous, Plant Seeds Grow Blessings, 2020. Photomontage, framed renderings printed on Luster 260 GSM. Courtesy of Olalekan Jeyifous. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Audiences that are unable to experience the show in person can explore the exhibit and its ideas virtually (see below) and by following and supporting the Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC). The collective, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, was formed by the 10 architects, designers, and artists in the exhibit in response to MoMA’s shortcomings in organizing the exhibit and as an agenda for long-term impact after the exhibit is over.
“These exhibitions usually stay in the speculative, but we wanted to move from the speculative into the generative, so that we can actually create a mechanism to support, fund, and create this type of work in the real world,” says Cooke.
“I want people to come through [Reconstructions] and have this profound realization that architecture . . . can reflect people’s cultural identities and actually become a vehicle for Black liberation and joy, instead of what it has been—a capitalist tool for subjugating and disempowering the masses,” says Cooke. “That’s what people are going to see—a really dense array of ways of seeing the world through architectural eyes that are not Western or White or European.”
LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES
Won’t be in New York this spring? You can still engage with Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America in a number of ways.
Black Reconstruction Collective: Follow BRC on Instagram and Twitter, and donate to the collective on its website.
Field Guide: The catalog for the exhibition, conceived as a field guide, features images, essays, and articles by members of the BRC, the curators, and other scholars, including Dream the Combine’s Jennifer Newsom, AIA, a Minnesota architect, who writes about her firm’s 2018 MoMA PS1 installation Hide & Seek.
Free Online Course: The “Reimagining Blackness and Architecture” course includes articles, essays, and videos relating to the exhibition’s subject matter. No architecture knowledge required.
Virtual Panels: Panel topics include “Black Reconstructions: Cities and Spatial Justice” on March 29 and “Black Reconstructions: In the Kitchen” on April 30.
Further Reading: Articles in The New York Times, Cultured, and The Architect’s Newspaper explore additional perspectives on Reconstructions.