How is your Action Fund fellowship assisting with your next book, "Putting Black in Place: A Spatial History of Black Architectural Modernity"?

For the Action Fund, I've been looking at early modern theories of space and placemaking. I want to try to produce a revisionist historiography of space-making, first within the European canon, and then looking at and studying American case studies to get a sense of how space and placemaking is operating in that discourse. I’ll then look at the ways that African Americans, particularly in the United States, have come in and established their own modern projects that were different from the modernism of European diasporic groups and international style aesthetics.

When you say space and placemaking, how would you explain that to the average person?

The Action Fund recently helped me with an exhibit that was on display at UT Austin called "The Black Home as Public Art." The exhibit touches on the ways that African Americans in the postwar period and contemporary period starting from 2005 to the present, have taken the private Black home in disinvested segregated neighborhoods and turned them into communal hubs of mutual aid, education and artistic experimentation.

We look at how radical activists like the Black Panther party and Amiri Baraka and other Black nationalist artists came into these spaces and tried to create something for working class folks. Every time Amiri Baraka went into a neighborhood and started a Black Arts Repertory/Theater School, he also established a community development corporation that would literally look to rebuild ghetto spaces. We look at his design for Kawaida Towers, which was the first black nationalist themed mixed-use residence with social amenities like theater spaces, after school spaces and clinics mixed with low income and middle-income housing in Newark, New Jersey.

There’s also the Black Panther Party headquarters in Oakland, which literally took a home that was a pre-existing architectural typology that they occupied. Through spatial experimentation, new programs, new hybrid mixtures and uses of space, they turned it into everything from an afterschool space for eating and learning, space for radical unionization and collective action, a space to reeducate yourself on community politics, hold voter drives, anything that the neighborhood needed that would help to empower the working class person.

There’s a long history of Black communities recalibrating architectural form and experimenting with the use of space. Black communities were always shuttled from one space to another, inheriting buildings that were made for other people, but constantly revising them in order to make it their own and to make it expressive of the social and cultural and political projects that they had that were independent of some of the other communities that were living around them.

What does this experimental use of space say about Black Modernism?

I think that Black architectural modernity was about modernizing vernacular practices, and bringing them into contemporary uses so that you could stay connected with the past. Oftentimes they started as practices of Black occupation, or Black resistance in white spaces, and depending on how amenable the situation was, then they formalized into architectural means. The example I always use is the work of Madam CJ Walker starting as a laundress, then moving into hair care. All of her lived spaces were multi-use spaces; they were both business spaces and domestic spaces, but they also were spaces of black philanthropy, particularly for black women.