Swanson Lecture: Mabel O. Wilson (Webinar)

Studio&: A Black Study

The “art of building” that is Architecture emerges concurrently with Europe’s colonial misadventures in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Modernity builds its superior “culture” with its forms, aesthetics, and practices, above and beyond the primitive, savage, barbarous, backward, folk, and the racial other. If, as poet Fred Moten posits “study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice,” then the body of work—writings, projects, exhibitions, and performances—by Mabel O. Wilson and her transdisciplinary practice Studio& asks: can the practice of architecture become a “Black study”?

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor in Architecture and also a professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University where she also serves as the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and co-directs Global Africa Lab. With her practice Studio&, she is a collaborator in the architectural team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia. She’s a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) a collective that advocates for fair labor practices on building sites worldwide. She has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2017) and Negro Building: African Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012). She co-edited with Irene Cheng and Charles Davis the recently published volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020).  For MoMA, she is co-curator of the forthcoming exhibition (February 2021) Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.

This lecture is sponsored by the J. Robert F. Swanson Fund.

The J. Robert F. Swanson Lecture Fund at Cranbrook Academy of Art was established in 1983 by the family of J. Robert F. Swanson, a noted architect who was also the son-in-law of Eliel Saarinen. Each year, the Swanson Lecture brings to the Cranbrook campus architects, designers, artists or scholars who have received critical acclaim for their work and enjoy a sustained record of excellence and achievement in their respective field.  J. Robert F. Swanson and his wife and lifelong design partner, Pipsan Saarinen Swanson, founded their firm Swanson Associates in 1947 and worked on many exteriors and interiors, including residences, schools, universities, churches, airports, banks, and government, industrial and commercial projects.