The University of Texas (UT) School of Architecture recently debuted an exhibition titled The Black Home as Public Art and will host a symposium on the same topic in September.
Dr. Charles L. Davis II
The exhibition and symposium are being organized by Dr. Charles L. Davis II, a UT School of Architecture Associate Professor. Mr. Davis holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.Arch and BPS from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His scholarship explores the role of racial identity and race thinking in architectural history and contemporary design culture. He is currently working on two book projects, one of which presents the overlooked contributions of Black artists and architects from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Lives Matter movement.
“The Black Home as Public Art” on view at the Mebane Gallery.
According to the UT website, the exhibition The Black Home as Public Art presents “eight artist-led practices that employ adaptive reuse and public art strategies to reinterpret the Black home to inflect the demands of Black social movements, contemporary politics, and racial uplift.” The show includes artists such as Theaster Gates, Rick Lowe, Tyree Guyton, and Amanda Williams.
“The Black Home as Public Art” on view at the Mebane Gallery.
Mr. Davis explains, “This exhibit uses the broad categories of ‘the activist-builder’ and ‘the artist-developer’ to analyze the types of social actors that employed a tactical combination of ad hoc spatial and material strategies to meet the social, political, and economic demands of the Black radical tradition from the 1960s to today. As architectural expressions of racial uplift, these projects collectively embody decolonial representations of Blackness in a settler colonial context.”
Symposium participants include Aisha Densmore-Bey, a Boston-based architect and designer; Curry J. Hackett, Distinguished Lecturer at The City College of New York; Scott L. Ruff, the principal of RuffWorks Studio and a Visiting Associate Professor of Architecture at Pratt Institute and New York Institute of Technology; Komozi Woodard, a professor of history, public policy, and Africana studies at Sarah Lawrence College; and Dell Upton, Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of California Berkeley and Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of California Los Angeles.
The Black Home as Public Art is the first edition in a series that will lay the groundwork for establishing The Black Space Project. Heather Woofter, the Dean of the UT School of Architecture, noted, “The Black Home as Public Art and the broader Black Space Project address aspects of our discipline that have been relegated to the margins of scholarship — the contributions of Black Americans and non-licensed practitioners. This important work expands the boundaries by which architects, designers, and theorists consider our built environment, broadening our understanding and paving the way for new, interdisciplinary avenues of inquiry.”
The exhibition is on view through November 15 at the Mebane Gallery inside Goldsmith Hall at the UT Austin campus. The symposium will take place on Wednesday, September 11, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., and Thursday, September 12, from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. The symposium will also be live-streamed via the School of Architecture’s YouTube channel.
Learn more about the exhibition and see the full event schedule via the UT School of Architecture website.
