Black Space, White Walls

After several delays, the much-anticipated Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America finally opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York on February 27. I visited the show the following day, excited to see the work of folx who have inspired my own architectural thinking. Upon entering the gallery, a pleasant white parent cheerfully turned to their pleasant white child as they left and said, “I really liked this exhibit! A LOT!” I thought to myself, what aspect of the legacy of racial and environmental injustice, or its presentation in a museum long criticized for its exclusionary practices toward people of color, could have prompted such a rosy response?

The show is MoMA’s first candid attempt to address the complex and often lachrymose relationship between race and architecture. Organized by associate curator Sean Anderson and architect and historian Mabel O. Wilson, it asked ten Black artists, architects, and designers to re-engage with the unfinished project of Reconstruction. Within this framework contributors could gauge the potentials for historical repair and reconciliation with the anti-Blackness long embodied in the practices of redlining, gentrification, and the criminalization that have shaped urban America.

While the show’s thematic is clearly freighted with legacies of racial inequity, the work is adamantly future-forward—a conscious decision by the curators that refuses more typical, entropic depictions of Blackness and Black spaces. The varied media on display similarly straddles historical and contemporary forms of Black material production, so that textiles, oral narratives, and patents are placed in dialogue with 3D point clouds, immersive renderings, and magnetic acoustic fields. From these encounters arise tensions that make palpable the flux and motion of Blackness and its often unseen or illegible spaces as theorized in Simone Browne’s Dark Matters.

David Hartt’s video installation, On Exactitude in Science (Watts), teeters between an aesthetic of precarity and a precarious aesthetic. The film materializes the “invisible” fabric of Watts, Los Angeles, giving body to air through fuzzy, mycelium-like entities and scattered rays of particles sampled into digital point clouds. Counterposing these are recordings of oral histories and macro shots of domestic surfaces—excessively rough concrete walls, perforated expanded polystyrene ceiling tiles—which suggest that tone and texture are fundamental grammars for understanding Black space.

These same elements are also present in Emanuel Admassu’s Immeasurability (Atlanta). A city-in-miniature, blanketed edge-to-edge in a black glittery sand (magnetite), is set against an immersive backdrop of digital collages and a suspended textile; concealed speakers emit white noise. The play of light on the magnetite is particularly mesmerizing, but Admassu also gestures toward unsettling themes: The gleaming surface mimics the mineral materiality of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which the textile explicitly relates to the ghostly history of the Middle Passage.

In her contribution We’re Not Down There, We’re Over Here (Kinosh), Amanda Williams puts forth several tools and fragments with which to project a Black futurity that builds on a history of Black inventors, scholars, and everyday makers. Her patent application for a “space-boat-ship-vessel-capsule” is among the most radical pieces in the show because it transforms her imaginative power into a legal structure of ownership that continues the project of Reconstruction, without ever citing it. It also tacitly raises the problem of cultural representation, particularly in a museum that has never before ceded gallery space to Black architects nor acquired their works. (MoMA does hold a photographic series by Williams, an artist, in its collection.)

Visually explosive as all these pieces are, the show is at the same time a profoundly aural experience. The conventions of architectural practice and exhibition design are geared to the quick movements of the eye over the stillness and quietness that serious works demand. Not so with Reconstructions. Many of the works have an audible component—Felecia Davis’s Fabricating Networks the more prominent among these—and all have been paired with audio tracks about their making (accessible via QR scans). In fact, it is this so-called “ephemera” surrounding the more recognizably architectural statements that truly constitutes the critical heart of the show, which repeatedly subtends the limitations of the conventionally architectural. The participants largely forgo the tools and signifiers of architectural production in favor of collaging, performances, narratives, and other forms of world building. That they did so points to architecture’s chronic inability to communicate the totality of black—in a catholic sense, extending Blackness to other minoritized groups deemed “problematic”—spaces. This may be the root of architecture’s anti-Blackness.

The displays require a certain amount of time and attention that was, during my visit, stymied by the hype surrounding the opening and by MoMA’s need for continuous gallery throughput in part due to Covid-19 adjustments. While reflecting on the exhibition next to Mario Gooden’s Protest Machine, I was asked by a staff member to exit the gallery in order to “make space for others.” The incident, ironic as it was, brought home the fact that merely giving space to others, as MoMA has done with Reconstructions, is hardly sufficient when the quality of that space, its mode of engagement, and the institutional apparatus behind it remain structurally the same. Quite literally, the structure of the gallery detracted from the work.

Reconstructions requires close attention to process both its brutal histories and its complex futures, but lacking this, one must reach for the exhibition catalog or seek out the many press inter-views the participants—self-styled into the Black Reconstruction Collective—have given. The availability of these materials points to the immense amount of invisible labor these creators have had to perform beyond and outside the museum’s white walls. What one makes of their efforts comes down to the work of critical self-reflection one is prepared to do. It will determine if you walk away from Reconstructions with a heavy conscious or whether you liked it A LOT!