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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
The Mission by Benson Joseph reflects on the history of Wesleyan Methodist Church, a former refuge for runaway slaves that is now a popular Mexican restaurant.
The built environment isn’t static. Everyday, structures are created, destroyed, and repurposed. Some are preserved while others are left to slowly decay. As time passes and the world changes, new meanings can become attributed to these spaces. Their pasts and histories become vulnerable and new realities may take shape. For better or for worse, the functions spaces once had, the people they once served, and the circumstances that led to their erasure fade and become forgotten.