UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The contributions that Felecia Davis, Penn State associate professor of architecture in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, and students in her ARCH 497 studio course this semester made to the mobile public art installation “Unmonument” will open to the public on Dec. 14 at The Print Factory, located at 130 S. Allegheny Street in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.

As part of Davis’ work as a co-founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC), “Unmonument” helps memorialize the liberators of Black America. The opening in Centre County is the third of five collaborative “Unmonument” interventions in the built environment by the BRC, with each location hosting an interactive, iterative intervention designed by a founding BRC board member. The previous two installments were in Chicago and Brooklyn, New York, and will move on to Los Angeles and Atlanta after its stay in Bellefonte.

Davis, who is the director of the Computational Textiles Lab (SOFTLAB) in the Stuckeman School’s Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, builds on the work she did for the "Fabricating Networks” installation as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s "Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America" exhibit in 2021 for this iteration of the installation, which is titled “UnMonument Bellefonte: Fabricating Networks.”

Davis and her students’ work is a response to a call that was set forth by the researchers with the Black History in Centre County, Pennsylvania: A Collaborative Public History and Arts Project, who explore the lives of Black communities within Bellefonte. Featuring scholarly works by collaborators Philip Ruth and Racine Amos, the fabrications consist of a series of layered maps of Black movement and history in the area that feature both interior and exterior spaces between the 1800s and today. 

According to event organizers, the maps will show neighborhoods or enclaves where Blacks lived and worked in Bellefonte from 1850 to 1950. The purpose is to understand the relationships of people to a place and how life was lived in Bellefonte by Black families. Ultimately the maps will show both movement of this group of people in plan and in section or across and upwards and downwards on the land itself. The horizontal surfaces of the heavily folded land in Bellefonte are exposed as places of continuity and the vertical surfaces are seen as physical and social discontinuity. The “Unmonument” may be understood as a visibility machine, helping people today see those people who have been erased from the map, the archive, the official town stories. 

The opening of the installation, which will be held from 6-10 p.m. Dec. 14, will feature programming including a film screening and a panel discussion on the history of Black movement in Bellefonte, exposing networks of lost narratives about people and their relationship to the land.

Directed by Zion Estrada, founder of Black Discourse, the film visualizes the horizontal and vertical movement of the Black population anchored in Bellefonte along with an assemblage of geological reports of the land, connecting the pre-historical creation of the valleys, the paths of the Indigenous with the parallel histories of the Underground Railroad. The film aims to tell a “folded history” that mimics the hilly and mountainous range of Centre County.

The film will be installed on a loop within the “Unmonument” exhibition, which will run through Feb. 28, 2025, at The Print Factory in Bellefonte.

Those who plan to attend the exhibition opening are encouraged to RSVP via the event webpage.