Search Results

Conversations around reparations are usually stilted by the minutia of details around dollar amounts and to whom payments would be made – direct descendants of slaves, up to what generation, how would they be paid, and on and on, all seemingly effective distractions intended to confuse and diffuse. Emerging to combat the maze of confusion, a group of Black architects, designers, artists, and scholars formed the nonprofit organization, Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC), to “amplify knowledge, production, and spatial practices by individuals and organizations…” The scant website describes their areas of focus as funding, design, and intellectual support to the ongoing and incomplete project of emancipation for the African Diaspora. And the website need not be laden with paragraph after paragraph of fancy descriptors, because the work speaks for itself. In a March 2021 article for Art in America, in his review of the MoMA exhibit Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, writer Julian Lucas poses the question, “How might the end of white supremacy transform American cities?” The MoMA exhibit is the debut for the BRC and consists of commissioned multimedia installations that analyze race and space in ten different cities from Watts to Syracuse. Each site is marked alongside the locations of freedmen's colonies on a map of the United States. In the catalogue that accompanies the exhibit, American historian Robin D.G. Kelley, writes that this kind of speculative scaffolding is a platform to reflect, “...on what it means for people determined to be free, to build for freedom, to retrofit a hostile and deadly built environment for reproduction of Black Life.” What is the Architecture of Reparations? is the first in a triptych of lectures given by members of the Black Reconstruction Collective to graduate architecture classes at major US universities. Visit the BRC website to learn more about their vision for attaining a reparative environment.

Attention is being given to Black visual artists more than ever before in the midst of the current social justice movement. But as many of us already know, Black artists have been using their work to portray experiences of the African diaspora, to critique colonialism, and to celebrate Black culture long before the movement started. Beginning in the late 19th century and moving into modern day, Artland takes readers on a brief journey through "some of the most powerful and multifaceted African American artists, powerfully depicting issues of racial oppression and identity." [ARTLAND] Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson, 1893, oil on canvas, 49 × 35.5 inches / 124.5 × 90.2 cm (Hampton University Museum, Hampton, VA)

It would be most understandable if in between protests, the pandemic, and trying to adjust to never leaving home, that instead of tapping into the upward movement of Black women at the helm in the arts, we simply missed the news. If that is indeed the case, then it is a great excuse for us to revisit and share that three talented Black women have taken on leadership positions in the arts, Janice Bond (Contemporary Arts Museum Houston), Leslie K. Johnson (Skirball Cultural Center LA), Sandra Jackson-Dumont (Lucas Museum of Narrative Art LA). I especially want to highlight one of Seattle’s most beloved former arts leaders, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, now Lucas Museum CEO. Sandra departed Seattle Art Museum to become the director of education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and even though she is now twice removed from Seattle, whenever equity and innovation in the arts is a topic among Seattle-based arts leaders, her name always comes up. And it’s no wonder. Jackson-Dumont walks tall in her word. Last summer, she announced a diverse slate of appointments to key positions at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, currently under construction and scheduled to open in 2023. “As we strive to become a vital source of education, inspiration, and dialogue for our close neighbors around Exposition Park, all the communities of Los Angeles, and people around the world, we could not be more thrilled with the team we have been able to recruit.” — Lucas Museum CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont We salute all of the women listed here: JANICE BOND, LESLIE K. JOHNSON, SANDRA JACKSON-DUMONT