Reimagining Blackness and Architecture
MoMA | Coursera, YouTube, audio tour
“Architecture structures our daily lives. It shapes our homes, streets, neighborhoods, cities, and more. But who gets to create and occupy these spaces? In the United States, a long history of anti-Black racism has erased the stories of Black architects and communities and created spatial inequalities that are built into the physical environment. Reimagining Blackness and Architecture explores the relationship between architecture and Blackness as an identity and a lived experience. You’ll hear directly from Black artists, architects, scholars, and writers who reimagine their surroundings and highlight the ways Black makers have changed the world. You’ll see how architects are working to transform American cities into more equitable places, using everything from textiles, hip-hop, and fiction to spices and spaceships. And you’ll hear from an international range of artists who create spaces for their communities and make stories of Black life visible in their work.”
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This course was developed in concert with the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, organized by Sean Anderson, Mabel O. Wilson, and Arièle Dionne-Krosnick. It is designed as a standalone online learning experience that enables global audiences—those who visited the exhibition as well as those who didn’t—to discover and engage with the key ideas long after the physical exhibition closed. Longer form audio, video, and text interviews in the course enable learners to go into depth on the architects’ and artists’ ideas and hear from them first-hand, and the parallel production allowed internal teams to efficiently and strategically create content for print, in-person, and online platforms.
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My role: I worked with a team of educators, curators, and film and audio producers to conceptualize the instructional design and lessons, provide interpretive feedback on video and audio scripts and drafts, edit texts, and draft creative discussion forum prompts and assessments.