Walter Hood: It has been really hard for Brown and Black people to imagine a future in this country.
Germane Barnes: Through policy, through redlining, through segregation, through gentrification, through lynches, through massacres, we are at risk.
Curator, Sean Anderson: My name is Sean Anderson
Curator, Mabel Wilson: I'm Mabel Wilson. And together we curated this exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.
Sean Anderson: The title comes from the period of Reconstruction in the United States in which the federal government would begin to redress the violence of slavery.
Mabel Wilson: In addressing the legacies of segregation and all of the ways in which the built environment serves as a medium of hostility and social repression, it seemed appropriate to think about what does it mean to repair and rebuild that environment?
Emanuel Admassu: We wanted to practice refusal against the ways in which architecture is typically defined and to imagine radically different worlds.
J. Yolande Daniels: The narratives that I found had to do with how they built community.
Germane Barnes: For many people that identify as black in the US, really, all you have is your imagination.
Olalekan Jeyiifous: Speculative fiction allows me the flexibility to create new parameters.
Felecia Davis: Liberation could happen in architecture for many people by imagining, dreaming,
Amanda Williams: What it might mean to have to fashion your own path to a space of freedom or to a space of self-determination.
Sekou Cooke: In freedom is joy and in joy is ultimate self-preservation and self-care.
Mario Gooden: To be really free is to be spatially free.
