The Boston Architectural College invites the community to join us for the 2019 Cascieri Lectureship in the Humanities, Memory/Race/Nation: The Politics of Modern Memorials, by Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia GSAPP Associate Professor, on Thursday, March 28, 2019, at 6 pm in Cascieri Hall.
Architects: earn 1 HSW by attending this lecture!
The recent fiery debates and now deadly protests sparked by the removals of Confederate war monuments around the United States raises important questions about the racialized origins of American democracy and as a consequence whether public representations can ever truly represent foundational ideals of liberty, equality, and justice for all. Professor Mabel O. Wilson's talk will explore the blueprint for the biopolitics of the U.S. social order, one where white citizens, idealized in the bronze figures of soldiers, politicians, and muses have thrived at the expense of the lives and labor of black and brown bodies, what Michel Foucault formulated in the modern racial state's power dynamic of "to ‘make' live and ‘let' die."
About Mabel O. Wilson
Mabel
O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor in Architecture and
also a professor in African American and African Diasporic Studies at
Columbia University, and the Associate Director of the Institute for
Research in African American Studies. She has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture and Negro Building: African Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums.
With her practice Studio &, she is a collaborator in the
architectural team currently developing designs for the Memorial to
Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia. Her
work has been featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale,
Architekturmuseum der TU Mūnchen, Storefront for Art and Architecture,
Art Institute of Chicago, Istanbul Design Biennale, Wexner Center for
the Arts, and the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum's
Triennial. She's a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture?
(WBYA?), a collective that advocates for fair labor practices on
building sites worldwide.
