Digging Deep

, the Columbia professor who’s teaching at Yale this year, received her undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia, where she returned, with Höweler + Yoon Architecture, to help design the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, completed in 2020. During a talk in Hastings Hall, Wilson discussed how “white Americans have deployed monuments to territorialize white supremacy,” and how, by contrast, the memorial unearths the buried history of four thousand enslaved men, women, and children who built and maintained UVA. Student protesters laid the ground for the project—whose diameter approaches that of the famous Rotunda—by demanding the university acknowledge the enslaved community that “lived under the constant threat of violence at any time from any white person,” Wilson said. “It came into fruition through a collective desire to face the past,” she concluded, allowing audience members to wonder how other buried histories might be faced through community action and design.