Registration: FORUM Series featuring Mabel Wilson

Architecture FORUM Lecture Series featuring Mabel Wilson

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor in Architecture, Planning and Preservation and also a professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University in New York

Lecture title: “Studio&: A Black Study”

The “art of building,” that is Architecture emerges concurrent with Europe’s colonial misadventures in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Modernity builds its superior “culture,” with its forms, aesthetics, and practices, above and beyond the primitive, savage, barbarous, backward, folk, and the racial other. If as poet Fred Moten posits “study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice,” then the body of work—writings, projects, exhibitions and performances—by Mabel O. Wilson and her transdisciplinary practice Studio& asks: can the practice of architecture become a “Black study”?

Mabel O. Wilson serves as the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and co-directs Global Africa Lab. With her practice Studio&, she is a collaborator in the architectural team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia. She’s a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) a collective that advocates for fair labor practices on building sites worldwide. She has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2017) and Negro Building: African Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012). She co-edited with Irene Cheng and Charles Davis the recently published volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). For MoMA, she is co-curator of the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (February 2021).

Tuesday, March 2, 2021
6:30 – 7:45 p.m.EST
Virtual event
A reminder, and link to the presentation, will be provided in the registration confirmation email