ARCHITECTURES OF BELONGING

Residual record snowfall clung to the streets of Brooklyn, turning curbs into uneven white ridges and muting the usual urgency of traffic on the early February afternoon of my visit to the Weeksville Heritage Center. Walking toward the preserved historic homes at the far end of the site, the stillness felt uncanny. The structures seemed less like artifacts than presences — as though former residents might be peering from behind lace curtains, momentarily interrupted by the arrival of contemporary visitors.

For many Black Americans, the question of ancestral home is inseparable from histories of displacement and reinvention. Communities have been built deliberately only to be erased or redefined by forces far beyond their control. Yet Black relationships to home have also been shaped by acts of deliberate self-making.

In Manhattan, Seneca Village emerged in 1825 as a thriving free Black settlement, 2 years before the legislated abolishment of slavery in NY in 1827. Churches, schools, and modest homes stood there until the community was razed in 1857 to clear land for Central Park. Nearly 350 residents were displaced, their presence largely erased from the city’s physical memory.

A Beverly Buchanan piece from Homework: Architects of Belonging.

That impulse toward community building also surfaced in Brooklyn with the founding of Weeksville in 1838 by James Weeks and a group of free Black entrepreneurs. "Weeksville is not an out of slavery narrative. It's a history, a story of what happens when free Black people take the opportunity to create their community on their own terms. And this is what you would see if Black people were allowed to do what they needed to do in order to create a community," noted Dr. Raymond Codrington, President/CEO of the Weeksville Heritage Center.

The founders of the Weeksville community made intentional choices about directing their own destiny. Property ownership — valued at at least $250 — enabled Black men to participate in the political process, making land both a material necessity and a tool of civic agency. Residents built institutions that supported Black life on its own terms.  The surviving houses, now carefully preserved, embody not just architectural history but a long-standing commitment to self-determination. Weeksville, the largest free Black settlement of its time, stands as one of the most powerful reminders of both vulnerability and determination.

“We've been hearing that Black women artists are having a moment – thought of as a moment. That's such a narrow idea of our presence in the art world. It's so much bigger than being invited into certain spaces. We are always going to do our work. We need more Black art spaces – our own." - Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

It is this legacy that forms the grounding context for Homework: Architectures of Belonging, an exhibition curated by writer and historian Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. Featuring ten artists, the show approaches home not as a fixed destination but as an evolving condition shaped by labor, migration, memory, and loss. Rhodes-Pitts is the inaugural curator-in-residence at the Weeksville Heritage Center. Recognizing the abundance of artist residencies, Weeksville decided to take a different approach by offering distinct curatorial opportunities.

For Rhodes-Pitts, situating contemporary art within Weeksville’s historical context was central to her curatorial approach. She has described the residency as an opportunity to think across layers of time — engaging the past while opening space for new cultural futures. To further articulate this intent, Sharifa points to the work of Beverly Buchanan and how it deepens this conversation. “The place is a blessing,” she reflects. “This is a space where people can gather and encounter art in context — among the histories and communities that shaped it.”

Known for her sculptural investigations of Southern vernacular architecture, Buchanan created small-scale structures that honor the improvised homes built by Black communities navigating constraints and resilience. Buchanan enjoyed museum exhibits before her death in 2015, and Rhodes-Pitts underscored the importance of placing Buchanan’s work where it resonates strongly within a site already marked by histories of intentional Black settlement.

Additional artistic responses inside the galleries include Lonnie Holley’s Hung Out: What’s on the line today? introduces a language of accumulation. A wooden drying rack holds rifle targets secured by clothespins — objects drawn from Holley’s childhood memories of Jim Crow Alabama. The work feels both domestic and threatening, collapsing everyday routines with the persistent presence of racial violence. Hung at eye level, the piece reads as an archive assembled in real time, memory suspended between fragility and endurance.

Lonnie Holley, Hung Out: What’s on the line today?, 2021. Photo by Vivian Phillips

Menna Agha’s Nubia Still Exists shifts the focus outward, toward questions of architectural disappearance and forced migration beyond the United States. Through texts and images drawn from her research into the settlements created for Nubian communities displaced by the construction of the Aswan Dam under Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government, the work examines how state power reshapes landscapes — and how cultural identity persists even after physical environments are irrevocably altered.

In Zenobia Lee’s Trace Disappearance, a photographic series documenting ornate gates adorning Brooklyn homes, architecture becomes a form of coded communication. These thresholds function simultaneously as protection and performance — signaling vigilance while also articulating aesthetic pride. The images invite viewers to consider how communities negotiate visibility and security in environments marked by rapid change.

Ajamu Kojo’s Black Blood No. 7: Four Women, part of his broader Black Wall Street series, introduces portraiture as a form of speculative reconstruction. Rendered in a photorealistic, historically inflected painting style, the work depicts contemporary sitters styled as residents of Greenwood’s pre-massacre community. The painting collapses time and distance, proposing an alternate continuity in which Black futures might still draw strength from interrupted pasts.

Positioned at a point of transition within the exhibition, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’s In Search of Sugarcane carries a quiet, deeply personal resonance. Although the projection component was not functioning at the time of my visit so I did not experience the film component, the installation’s conceptual framing remained legible and deeply impactful. The work, an alter comprised of empty frames and some images of a failing interior, reflects Diggs’s attempt to remain in her Harlem apartment after it was sold following nearly three decades of her mother’s residency. Loss is obvious. The centerpiece is the salvaged mailbox from the apartment. The installation quietly underscores the instability of even the most intimate definitions of home.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, In Search of Sugar Cane, 2025, mixed media. Photo by Jens Schott Knudsen.

Rather than offering singular definitions, the curatorial approach and the exhibit invite viewers to consider how histories of displacement, labor, and cultural survival continue to shape contemporary spatial imagination.

Weeksville’s leadership sees the residency as a way to expand public engagement with Black history. As Dr. Codrington explains, “Sharifa does such a great job of thinking about Black historical narratives and has the ability to push how we relate to the Black historical canon. This residency allows us to expand people’s ideas about what can be presented in a historic place like Weeksville.”

Programs Manager Sika Bonsu emphasizes the exhibition’s capacity to slow visitors down in a moment defined by speed and fragmentation. She is particularly invested in bringing young audiences into the space, hopeful that encounters with the artwork might spark new ways of imagining their own futures.

The exhibition’s title draws inspiration from scholar Sara Ahmed’s observation that “we have much to work out from not being at home in the world,” alongside Audre Lorde’s call to transform the structures that sustain inequality and domination. Throughout Homework, artists respond by proposing alternative architectures — speculative, provisional, and deeply rooted in lived experience.

Rhodes-Pitts is a deep and considerate thinker. Her care for the art and the artists is visible. Her writer sensibilities are evident in her curatorial choices. "This is like an essay that happens in 3 dimensions," she shared. "The work has come together in a way that makes me think about walking and talking with the artists and viewers. I regard this as more than a show. It's a series of conversations as a thread. Sparking ideas about all of the things that relate to home work."

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, In Search of Sugarcane (close up). Ajamu Kojo, image from Black Blood No. 7: Four Women.

In thinking about home, Sharifa shared the ways in which she is considering the concept, "Quilts as art objects and functional items. It's the way we keep our homes. A place to be together. Taking into account the levels of displacement taking place now – who gets to make a home. How do we feel at home outside of physical structures? I'm also thinking about the fact that the history of Weeksville does not highlight many women, but I'm thinking about the prominence of women in the making of this home."

Sharifa is fully on board with the fact that this inaugural curatorial residency is an experiment in many ways. "I'm happy to be a guinea pig and see what this can set the stage for," she shared.

To close our conversation, I asked Sharifa to share her view on the future for Black artists. “We've been hearing that Black women artists are having a moment – thought of as a moment. That's such a narrow idea of our presence in the art world. It's so much bigger than being invited into certain spaces. We are always going to do our work. We need more Black art spaces – our own."

Moving through this historic site, I found myself unexpectedly at ease. Weeksville felt like home to me — not only as an institution devoted to art, culture, and history, but in the warmth of its clearly illustrated mission to sustain a legacy of Black self-determination. That feeling lingered long after stepping back onto the slushy sidewalks of Brooklyn.

If Weeksville demonstrates anything, it is that home has never been guaranteed for Black communities. It has had to be claimed, constructed, defended, and, when necessary, imagined anew. Homework does not offer resolution to that reality. Instead, it insists that belonging remains an unfinished project — one shaped not only by loss, but also by the ongoing refusal to disappear.

Homework: Architectures of Belonging is on view at the Weekville Heritage Center, 158 Buffalo Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, through April 3, 2026.

Full list of exhibited artists:

Menna AghaAuclair

Beverly Buchanan

sonia louise davis

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs & Gabri Christa

Lonnie Holley

Ajamu Kojo

Zenobia Lee

Zyanya

About Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is a writer, scholar, and cultural organizer whose work explores African American history, place, and collective memory. She is the author of Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, a New York Times Notable Book and National Book Critics Circle finalist, and Jake Makes a World: Jacob Lawrence, a Young Artist in Harlem, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art.

A 2025 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Rhodes-Pitts has contributed to monographs on Simone Leigh, Dawoud Bey, and Richard Mayhew, among others. She is an associate professor of writing at Pratt Institute, where she also leads the Black Studies minor, and organizes collaborative public projects through The Freedwomen’s Bureau.

About Weeksville Heritage Center

Weeksville Heritage Center is a historic site and cultural center in Central Brooklyn that uses education, arts and a social justice lens to preserve, document and inspire engagement with the history of Weeksville, one of the largest free Black communities in pre-Civil War America, and the Historic Hunterfly Road Houses.