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