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. 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 current exhibition Reconstructions: Blackness and Architecture in America. 

 

 
Title- Studio&: A Black Study 

   

Synopsis:  Modernity has built its superior culture through its forms, aesthetics, and practices to place it above and beyond the primitive, savage, folk, and the racial other. If, as poet Fred Moten suggests “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 this lecture/q&a by Mabel O. Wilson on her transdisciplinary practice Studio& will ask: can the practice of history/design become a “Black study”?