UNIVERSTY PARK, Pa. — The 10 architects, artists and designers whose work is currently featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America” exhibit, and who are collectively known as the Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC), will join the Stuckeman School at 6 p.m. on March 24 as the final guests in the school’s Virtual Lecture Series.
In the talk, titled “Black Joy,” the audience will be given a video tour of the exhibit that opened in New York on Feb. 27 while BRC members discuss concepts and themes in the works they created for the show.
According to MoMA, the commissioned pieces “explore how people have mobilized black cultural spaces, forms and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance and refusal.”
Felecia Davis, principal of Felecia Davis Studio and associate professor of architecture at Penn State, is a co-founder of the BRC, which has been giving virtual lectures together at universities and institutions around the nation on issues surrounding racial injustice and Black history since the fall.
Along with Davis, who is also the Carey Memorial Early Career Professor in the Arts and director of the Computational Textiles Lab (SOFTLAB) in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, the BRC is comprised of:
- BRC co-founder Emanuel Admassu, co-founding partner of AD—WO and associate professor of architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design.
- Germane Barnes, director of Studio Barnes and assistant professor at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture.
- Sekou Cooke, founder of Sekou Cooke Studio and assistant professor at the School of Architecture at Syracuse University.
- J. Yolande Daniels, co-founder of studioSUMO and assistant professor at the University of Southern California School of Architecture.
- Mario Gooden, co-founder of Huff + Gooden and professor of practice at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP).
- Walter Hood, creative director and founder of Hood Studio Design and professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning and urban design at the University of California, Berkeley.
- Olalekan Jeyifous, a Nigerian-American visual artist and designer.
- V. Mitch McEwen, co-founder of Atelier Office, assistant professor at Princeton University School of Architecture and director of Princeton’s research group Black Box.
- Amanda Williams, a visual artist who trained as an architect and is an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University GSAPP.
The MoMA show, which has been described by organizers as “an investigation into the intersections of architecture, blackness and anti-black racism in the American context,” runs through the end of May.
The virtual event, which is hosted by the Department of Architecture in partnership with the Stuckeman School and WPSU, is free and open to the public. Pre-registration via bit.ly/moma-BRC is required.