"The Mission" by Benson Joseph reflects on the history of Wesleyan Methodist Church, a former refuge for runaway slaves that is now a popular Mexican restaurant.

The built environment isn’t static. Everyday, structures are created, destroyed, and repurposed. Some are preserved while others are left to slowly decay. As time passes and the world changes, new meanings can become attributed to these spaces. Their pasts and histories become vulnerable and new realities may take shape. For better or for worse, the functions spaces once had, the people they once served, and the circumstances that led to their erasure fade and become forgotten. 

There are a myriad of forces that drive this ever-occurring phenomenon, ranging from natural to deliberate actions. And, this is where difficult questions arise. What is the history of this place? Why has it been forgotten? Was this nullification intentional? Who and what were the agents that drove these actions? While these are complex questions, in taking a step back and observing broader historical contexts, explanations for these occurrences can be revealed. And, Syracuse Architecture’s National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS) chapter did just that. 

NOMAS is an organization that aims to be a safe space for students of color in architecture. They champion diversity within the field by promoting excellence, community engagement, and professional development. The group was revived in 2018 and now organizes events celebrating Black History Month each year. 

This year, the month was celebrated through a lecture series titled “Hidden Histories” that sought to investigate and uncover the hidden histories of systemic racism and its connection to architecture and urban design. 

The idea for the “Hidden Histories,” according to The Daily Orange, came from the NOMAS secretary and second-year architecture student, Sofia Gutierrez, who thought of the theme after hearing architect, researcher, curator, and Syracuse Architecture professor Sekou Cooke speak about the 15th Ward, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Syracuse that was destroyed during the construction of Interstate 81. 

Cooke ended up being the first speaker in the lecture series, where he spoke about his exhibition “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America” being held at the Museum of Modern Art. Aside from this, Cooke’s lecture was mainly his attempt to critique the Blueprint 15 project for Syracuse by using hip-hop culture and Black history as its primary lenses. Cooke was followed by a lecture hosted by Dr. Biko Mandela Gray, an Assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse University’s College of Art & Sciences. The lecture titled “Blackness, Religion, and Architecture” explored the hidden history of Black churches. The final lecture for the series concluded on February 22nd, which consisted of an all-Black women’s symposium, including architects Felecia Davis, Ifeoma Ebo, and Pascale Sablan.

Accompanying the lecture series was a video exhibition titled “Hidden Realities,” curated by fifth-year Syracuse Architecture students Parinda Sangkaeo and Benson Joseph. Presented through a collection of three videos, the exhibition explored hidden narratives of systemic racism. It was a collaborative effort that involved twelve student designers, who each addressed a specific topic and a particular narrative through a poster. A total of fifteen posters were created, with five posters being showcased in each of the videos. They were then printed, placed, and documented at selected sites across Syracuse, New York. The designers were given the choice of deciding where the posters were placed, reflecting a personal connection to the locations that were selected and their histories. This component of the exhibition allowed the “hidden realities” to manifest in physical form. They made them real and tangible. 

“So contextualizing it in a physical space and giving people a point of reference that they can actually get to, to understand how close this stuff really is,” Benson Joseph told Archinect. “It’s not just something you learn about in a book. It’s not happening somewhere different. It makes it obvious that it’s something that happens across the board. And these sorts of effects are not isolated to a particular part of the country, but in every part of the country, in every city, no more directly to a certain demographic of people.”

Acting almost like a form of protest, the posters, while subtle and unassuming, are unmistakable and loud in the messages they portray, amidst their mundane and fixed surroundings. Joseph’s poster “The Mission” is a good example of this. Pasted on the entrance of a popular local Mexican restaurant known as “The Mission,” the poster highlights the building’s significant past. It was formerly the Wesleyan Methodist Church, which opened its doors in 1847. The church became a major Underground Railroad site, serving as a refuge that offered a lifeline for runaway slaves. 

“The idea is that you are sitting in this beautiful restaurant, enjoying your mojito, eating your tacos, but 200 years ago, a slave used to hide there,” Joseph told The Daily Orange. 

Another poster made by Sangkaeo titled “Federal-Aid Highway Act” is affixed to a light post under Interstate 81. Its design mirrors that of 1950s automobile ads, specifically ones from an exhibition sponsored by GMC for the purpose of selling cars to the general public. This, in conjunction with the federal government’s mission to construct vast networks of highways, led to the signing of the Federal-Aid Highway Act. While its legacy is celebrated for widely connecting the country, it’s often forgotten how the resulting urban renewal, white flight, and displacement decimated African American communities. 

Other posters explore topics relating to the mass surveillance of low-income, black neighborhoods, equality for transgender people of color, and housing discrimination. The videos showcasing the posters were shown before each lecture and tied back to the topics being discussed. They comprised archival footage, soundbites, and images, which came together to form engaging collages of historical and present-day contexts. The videos were placed into three categories: the hidden histories of the local Syracuse region, the American narrative, and then the international narrative of the black diaspora. The five posters in each video were in accordance with these themes. 

Following the exhibition, the physical posters are being submitted to a program called Art in Action, a program of NOMAS, where the pieces will be auctioned off. The funds collected from this will be donated directly to Salt City Harvest Farm to help with their initiatives to empower the local Syracuse community through opportunities in local agriculture. 

Sangkaeo and Joseph believe this work of uncovering the hidden histories of systemic racism doesn’t have to be done solely from an architectural perspective. 

“...the personal reason is to find a medium or source that you enjoy doing first and then try to learn it through that medium, through that source,” Joseph describes, “And if that makes any sense, it could be music. It could be art. It's just because in the process it made us want to learn more about it because we were sort of creating and I think that's a good thing that art, I guess, offers us the opportunity to be able to create something when the process enriches ourselves…”

“So we were doing collages, drawings, model making, really fun stuff,” Sangkaeo adds, “But it was based off of these readings that introduced us to the systemic racism history of Syracuse. So while we always like having fun designing, making with our hands with pens, pencil, at the same time we learned a lot from it, and at the same time, we were kind of encouraged to make our own argument, our own perspective.”