Amanda Williams

The Black Home as Public Art consists of an exhibition and symposium examining creative notions of the Black home in the United States during the postwar period. 

The exhibition will be on display August 30–November 15, and will present 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. These include designers like Theaster Gates, Tyree Guyton, and Amanda Williams who have built their practices on reforming the detached housing typologies found in working-class neighborhoods in the United States into a form of publicly engaged art. Contributions of featured projects range from the introduction of new multifunctional interior spaces and the painting of exterior surfaces of a building (as a public canvas) to the commissioning of a building study and the installation of contemplation gardens that transform an empty lot of a dilapidated neighborhood into an open air living room. 

A one-and-a-half-day symposium on September 11–12 will complement the exhibition, bringing together designers, historians, curators, and archivists for interdisciplinary discussions about these projects, their significance, and the importance of pluralizing the architectural canon for a more holistic understanding of our built environment. 

This program is organized by Associate Professor Charles L. Davis II and serves as the inaugural edition of a series that seeks to lay the groundwork to establish a Black Space Archive documenting creative interventions into the built environment, to support and expand future scholarship. It is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, an Arnold W. Brunner Grant from The New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and administered by The Center for Architecture, the Meyer Foundation Centennial Lectureship and the McDermott Excellence Fund.