April 19, 2021 • Jay Cephas on “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America” Installation view of “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,” at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Robert Gerhardt. IN 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Coming in at just under eight hundred pages, Du Bois’s “essay” served to carefully delineate the role of African Americans in the social, political, and economic restructuring of the United States following the devastation of the Civil War. In many ways, the artists, architects, and designers included in “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, have set for themselves a task no less ambitious than Du Bois’s. The exhibition surveys the complex and often contested relationships between race and space, drawing an analogy to Reconstruction to shape their investigations of Black spatial practices. Organized by associate curator Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson, an architect and Columbia University professor, the exhibition features commissioned works by Emanuel Admassu, Germane Barnes, Sekou Cooke, J. Yolande Daniels, Felecia Davis, Mario Gooden, Walter Hood, Olalekan Jeyifous, V. Mitch McEwen, and Amanda Williams, as well as new photographs and a film by artist David Hartt.