The Black Home as Public Art

The Black Home as Public Art is an exhibition and symposium examining creative notions of the Black home in the United States from the 1960s to today.

Organized by Associate Professor Charles L. Davis II and The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture’s Center for American Architecture and Design, the project 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.

On display at UT Austin through November 15, the Black Home as Public Art exhibition will feature projects from designers like Theaster Gates, Tyree Guyton, Rick Lowe, Smokehouse Associates, and Amanda Williams, who have built their artistic practices on reforming the detached housing typologies found in working-class neighborhoods into a form of publicly engaged art. It will also include the work of activists and theorists such as Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, the playwrights June Jordan and Amiri Baraka, and the philosopher Angela Davis.

Complementing the exhibition is a one-and-a-half-day symposium, September 11–12, that will bring 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 the built environment. Invited symposium participants include Aisha Densmore-Bey, Curry J. Hackett, Scott L. Ruff, and Komozi Woodard, as well as Dell Upton, who will be giving the opening keynote address at 5pm on September 11.

Together, the exhibition and symposium serve as the inaugural edition of The Black Space Project, a broader research effort that will mine the lost history of African American contributions to the built environment through exhibitions, symposia, publications, and workshops—developing a more complete portrait of Black architectural modernity as it emerged across the United States.

The Black Home as Public Art 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 Inc., the Meyer Foundation Centennial Lectureship, and the McDermott Excellence Fund.

The exhibition and symposium are free and open to the public. Symposium seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis; no registration required. The event will also be streamed live on the School of Architecture’s YouTube channel.