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The Black Reconstruction Collective honors cultural practitioners Tonika Lewis Johnson and Ife Salema Vanable in inaugural prize

2022-07-28T18:51:00-04:00

Continuing with its mission to support and acknowledge Black cultural agents of change within the community, the Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC) has announced the winners of its inaugural Black Reconstruction Collective Prize. Made possible with support from the Mellon Foundation, the BRC recognizes Chicago-based photographer/social justice artist Tonika Lewis Johnson and Bronx-based architect, historian, and theorist Ife Salema Vanable as this year's winners.

"This prize was created by the founders of the Black Reconstruction Collective as a way to launch the organization as a funder and support system for Black creatives," shares the BRC. Both will receive an unrestricted monetary prize of $5,000, allowing them to use the funds to carry out their design pursuits as they see fit. Newly appointed BRC Collaborative Manager Michelle Lisa Polissaint writes, "Ife and Tonika exemplify the mission of the Black Reconstructive Collective & I'm so excited to spend the next year working...

Architect and researcher Sekou Cooke joins the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute as a 2021-2022 fellow

2021-06-15T20:15:00-04:00

Jamaican-born architect, researcher, educator, and curator Sekou Cooke is named a W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellow. The fellowship is part of the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.

"The W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellowship program invites scholars, artists, public intellectuals, and activists across the humanities and social sciences to pursue independent projects encompassing Africa and its diasporas. Fellows arrive from the U.S., Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe to be in residence at the Hutchins Center for either a full academic year or one semester."

The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research shares Cooke will be "in residence as a Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year," where he will work on his project 3D Turntables Remix: The Architectural Technology of Hip-Hop.

Cooke joins a cohort of fifteen other research fellows.

"As architec...

The author of 'Architecture in Black' delivers an exhibition that depicts Blackness as a 'process of unraveling and becoming'

2021-04-12T14:59:00-04:00

In 2000, distinguished scholar, designer, inventor, and teacher Darell Wayne Fields, Ph.D. published "Architecture in Black." His book is a theoretical treatise that expands on the historical, philosophical, and semiotic texts regarding race in architectural discourse. It argues "architecture, as an aesthetic practice, and blackness, as a linguistic practice, operate within the same semiotic paradigm." Through this extensive examination, Fields curated On Solitude which is described as a "contemporaneous anthology" that shadows Architecture in Black.

I thought Blackness’s intersection with architecture represented epic struggle and conflict. The conflict remains true in what the exhibition has to say (to me), but there’s a critical difference. The artifacts, interacting together, signify and witness architecture’s subtle, yet persistent, unraveling. - Darell Wayne Fields