An image from architect V. Mitch McEwen’s “R:R,” which envisions an alternative New Orleans.
Image courtesy of the artist/Museum of Modern Art
Confronting Architecture’s Complicity with Racism
In “Reconstructions” at the Museum of Modern Art, African-American designers and artists envision an architecture of Blackness that grapples with the field’s troubled history.
A wheeled off-kilter black-steel framework, among the first items the visitor encounters on the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art, could be taken as an industrial remnant mounted with sails to carry it away.
A closer examination of the work — “The Refusal of Space” by architect and professor Mario Gooden — reveals it as an armature to document protests and host short videos on 1960s civil rights actions in Nashville. Its wheels evoke the trolley lines built in 1905 by African-American businessmen in response to a law requiring segregated streetcars. White interests sabotaged the lines, forcing them to close.