The Boston Architectural College (BAC) hosts the traveling exhibit, Native(s) by MacArthur Fellow, Walter Hood, in the accessible, public McCormick Gallery. Through this exhibit and accompanying public lecture, Hood probes how landscapes inform our notions of identity and belonging. Hood also asks fundamental questions about our relationships with changing environments, place inheritance, and decolonization and decarbonization. His work invites visitors and audiences to unearth erased daily and heroic narratives.

Basket Houses from the Native(s) exhibit by Hood Studio. Photos by Clelia Cadamuro and Matteo de Mayda.

This exhibit will be open from August 21, 2024, through January 20, 2025.

The exhibit was originally created in response to Lesley Lokko’s call for the 2023 Venice Biennale to center Africa and the African diaspora in conversations about our constructed environments. It includes wooden artifacts, sectional drawings, and wallpaper depicting perspectives of landscapes and narratives. As the exhibit travels to the United States-first to the BAC and then to the University of Virginia (UVA)-it adapts to each host institution and context.

Paline Columns for the Native(s) Entry Walk at the Venice Biennale 2023 Installation of Native(s) by Hood Studio. Photo by Clelia Cadamuro and Matteo de Mayda.

The exhibit and its complementary programming invites audiences to engage in dialogue with the themes explored by Hood through his landscape design and public art. Additional educational and community programming facilitated by the BAC cultivates a broader discourse about these themes in relation to the urban spaces we inhabit. This exhibit contributes to the emerging scholarship of spatial justice through restored narratives of place.

Native(s) poses critical questions and invites discourse about our emergent collective relationship with public and urban spaces, as well as our unequal ability to influence their creation. The BAC fosters this discourse through a strategic community partnership initiative in Boston, where issues of race, belonging, and design are central. The BAC’s Urban Design and Planning Pre-College Fellowship with the City of Boston engages Boston high school students in co-creating ancillary components of the Native(s) exhibit, resulting in a spatial justice-focused urbanism curriculum that can be shared with the BAC’s partners at UVA.

From Hood Studio about Native(s)

View of the Venice Biennale 2023 Installation of Native(s) by Hood Studio. Photo by Clelia Cadamuro and Matteo de Mayda.

The world’s flora, colonized alongside the diaspora of human conquest, brings into question the very idea of the “native.” Yet although place is no longer particular, and the “unspoiled” and the “untouched” is antiquated, there remains a penchant for “native.” Colonized peoples—the conquered, the vulnerable, the marginalized—are classified in this way. And today, in the controlled natural ecologies we live in, there is an advocacy for an origin fiction: the native plant.

We live in a hybrid world where people and flora are continuous strangers in new lands. Environments are already changed, in a state of constant becoming. Understanding them in this light, I ask: what if they could be born again, purely natural human constructs that engender new ways of living with the particularities of a given place? Can design create infrastructure and context for a new beginning where everything belongs to the same place, creating new productions that are hereditary, not mere copies?

The decolonized and decarbonized are not about sameness but difference. We are all native to the places that we inhabit over time, along with the flora that sprouts up around us. What if we could connect to environments through native infrastructures that do not separate us from the world and each other, but that enmesh us in the raw, unspoiled architecture and landscape of our machinations?

Acknowledgments

Basket Houses under assembly for the Native(s) exhibit by Hood Studio. Photo by Clelia Cadamuro and Matteo de Mayda.

Team members:
Walter Hood, Alma Du Solier, Sarita Schreiber, Kelley Johnson, Olivia Hansberg, Chris Derry, Grace Mitchell Tada

Authorial collaborators:
Lewis Watts, photographer, Julie Dash, Geechee LLC; Rachael Watanabe-Batton, Contradiction and Struggle Grace Mitchell Tada

Technical collaborators:
Hood Design Studio, ArchDesign Custom Fabrication; Annacaterina Piras Arch PhD, LW Circus-Onlus; Tipping Structural Engineers

Generous supporters of this exhibit:
Shafran Haimes Foundation and Maryann Thompson Architects

Film: 
This exhibit also includes an excerpt from Julie Dash’s film, Daughters of the Dust. We gratefully acknowledge Ms. Dash’s contribution to this exhibit.