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Unfrozen Neighborhoods
John Haberin New York City
Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness
Monuments Now: Part 2
"To be really free is to be spatially free." Mario Gooden was speaking of Nashville, Tennessee, where African Americans face, in his words, a "refusal of space." It could be a refusal of fair housing. It could be a refusal of freedom from intimidation.
He was speaking, too, of his contribution to "Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America"—where black artists, designers, and architects fly in the face of refusal. They map past changes, including patterns of discrimination and the destruction of communities. And then they reimagine architecture as a locus of freedom, including the freedom to change the future. 
They see their work as a continuation of Reconstruction after the Civil War, which offered blacks a voice in the South, however briefly. They construct alternatives on computer and in models so spatially free that they tower above as if in flight. At the same time, they seem forever torn between a lost past and an uncertain future, at the Museum of Modern Art.
For so ambitious a theme, MoMA commissions just ten projects from as many cities, from the Black Reconstruction Collective. An eleventh contributor, David Hartt, films Watts in Los Angeles not as the scene of poverty or long-past riots, but as a succession of precious spaces. Their work spills out from just one room onto a corridor—and, happily, onto one another. Has a succession of black towers, by Walter Hood in Oakland, sprung to life in living color? But no, Olalekan Jeyifous envisions Crown Heights in Brooklyn in virtual reality. Architecture, they suggest, has failed to keep up with life.
Still, they have their hopes. Gooden recreates a shopping cart that might be the stock in trade of the homeless, topped by a Confederate flag. Painted black, these markers of hopelessness have begun to shimmer. It reminded me of how grieving brings release for empathy and anger, in "Grief and Grievance" at the New Museum—and of my own search for new monuments on a cold day in Queens. I shall always associate Socrates Sculpture Park with the triple warmth of August, a neighborhood park, and New York summer sculpture. And there I was back along the East River in freezing weather and the fading light of a dreadful, dying year. I had come for the conclusion of "Monuments Now."
Spatially free
Just what, though, does architecture have to do with blackness? Is it no more than a pun on reconstruction? One might go wondering what it would take even to reconcile Gooden's demands, however urgent and real. Someone without affordable housing may have too little architecture and too much space. One might go, too, expecting either of two very different shows. One show would catch up with black architects, to give them at last their due.
That, alas, might mean a small show indeed, giving a discipline with enormous barriers, including barriers to women. Museums and public spaces fall back time and time again on a familiar cast of white men like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Thomas Heatherwick, and Renzo Piano. As if to rub it in, MoMA pretty much sticks to artists. When it comes to models, they prefer handmade and found objects to an architect's tools of the trade. J. Yolande Daniels embellishes her pictures of LA settlement patterns with pages that take on the meaning of race itself. Her numbered points and decorative borders recall old manuscripts—perhaps because a racist past refuses to die.
A second show might ask how architecture serves African Americans and how it holds them back. There, though, it might run into the opposite problem—of requiring an entire history of architecture and urban planning. As curators, Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson with Arièle Dionne-Krosnic speak of blackness as "embedded in the built environment." They point to discriminatory housing, predatory lending, and oppressive "urban renewal," and contributors highlight all three. Germane Barnes pictures Miami for blacks, facing signs for No Beach Access. Sekou Cooke sees eminent domain, or the public seizure of land, as furthering not "community development" but "community displacement."
When Barnes speaks of her work as a search for sedimentation, she means both land on which to build and memories. She can remember a community centered on the front porch and the kitchen, and she suspends the ultimate in spice racks overhead. And Cook can point to land in Syracuse, New York, seized not for public housing, but for interstate highways, and he leaves a physical reminder of the toll in crumbling stairs. Emanuel Admassu pictures another lost community, in Atlanta, as a deserted model city on black sand. In a photograph, a sign for Waffle House presides over nothing but a field of wheat. Born in Ethiopia, he crossed over another kind of sedimentation to observe the loss, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Some contributors could belong in both shows. Yet they picture not so much specific architecture as alternative realities. Hood's text calls for land, education, freedom—oh, and a few more concrete things, such as an end to police violence. He speaks of his wood constructions as black towers for Black Power. V. Mitch McEwen asks what New Orleans might have become if a slave rebellion had succeeded, and he answers with the idyllic present of a dancing woman and a garden with trellised towers. Buckminster Fuller himself might be setting aside his spheres to reach for the sky.
Compared to actual architecture and communities, the show can feel unbearably escapist—a Not in My Backyard movement without the racism. The path to affordable housing cannot lie in restoring things as they were, no more than adequate health care for African Americans can rely on what serves them now. Jeyifous celebrates her "frozen neighborhoods," but of course they are not at all frozen, not in her imagination, and that which is frozen dies. Still, they have their tarnished memories and joyful black towers, from Hood's Oakland to Barnes's spice rack and a "flower antenna" by Felecia Davis in Pittsburgh. Amanda Williams in Kimlich, Missouri, constructs her Spaceboatvesselcapsules from rescue blankets and ice cream scoops. Hood also tells the story of finding a key in his pocket as opening doors, and who can say where they will lead?
A monumental chill
On that cold day, a few from the neighborhood in Queens still found a welcome at party-colored picnic tables, which circle the pillar that Ramírez Jonas offered in summer as a monument and a grill. It has been a long time, though, since anyone found sustenance or tended the fires. In October, ten artists in competition joined him, Xaviera Simmons, and Jeffrey Gibson, but their flame might have had died as well. In the process, "Monuments Now" has taken on a greater poignancy, only sometimes intended. It seems only fair that the three commissioned works got a head start, rather than being displaced by the show's second part. It seems only right, too, that they will all be gone by summer.
Sandy Williams IV erects a short wall with the folds of an accordion book, the smeared pattern of an American flag, the black and white of racial divisions, a hint of the barriers that have kept them apart, and the wax that has served Jasper Johns for a painted flag as well. Yet this wax candle's flame has gone out. Nearby Daniel Bejar has brought a boulder to the park, like carrying proverbial coals to Newcastle. He means to evoke past monuments with lesser artistry, and he adds a faux bronze door with an inscription to immigrants—on the very eve, it proclaims, of an ICE raid. All I could see, though, in its interior was a cold place for a hearth. It dares one to judge just how much a monument can memorialize.
Could I still look up to the work from August (as I described then)? Could I trouble in the freezing cold to review the long text on racial relations from Simmons—or to take Gibson's ziggurat seriously as a tribute to indigenous peoples alongside Beau Dick in masks? I cannot swear that the ten new artists could either, no more than Bejar can manage genuine bronze. Still, he means his inscription seriously, and the same ambivalence animates the entire show. It has room, too, for four walls by the "next generation" of "Socrateens," with photos of the community and cuts in the shape of people who may yet penetrate. But can monuments still live in the here and now?
Andrea Solstad, in "Total Disbelief" not long ago at SculptureCenter, is obviously skeptical. Her bare excuse for a pillar combines shipping labels and aluminum from which you will have to find your own destination or make your own soda cans. Others are more determined to commemorate the borough's diversity. Bel Falleiros arranges a brick circle on a hill, like Central American ruins or earth art now. One must just accept that her mirror of the cosmos is little more than a mound of earth. Dionisio Cortes Ortega alludes directly to local geography with an arch patterned after the Croton reservoir, like an extension of the model watershed at the Queens Museum.
Jenny Polak, who has worked before with sanctuaries and the plight of immigrants, sets her fences topped by barbed wire just offshore, with an eye to the prison population still on Rikers Island. That makes it a bit hard to make out the message on pennants covering its surface. Aya Rodriguez-Izumi constructs a Shinto temple from metal bars and glass beads, to evoke prisoners first of Japan in World War II and then the American occupation. It looks colorful and meditative enough, but it wants to pack an awful lot of history. Fontaine Capel tilts two sets of stairs so that they half face one another. They mean to bring people together, like brownstone stoops in summer, but that only brings out how isolated they both are—and how they point would-be climbers in opposite directions.
Works like these may actually gain from the limits of the artist's vision, but two last monuments take the long view. Patrick Costello simply plants a garden, as Ceding Ground, and Kiyan Williams reaches deeper into the earth with soil from African American burial grounds in Elmhurst, a few miles to the east. Cracked and dried, it takes on the texture of bark for what could be slim trunks rising of their own accord. They are, though, unnaturally distended arms, their hands pleading for life. The glint of minerals here and there suggests that they have already found something as precious as freedom. They are, in a title taken from Richard Wright on the Great Migration, Reaching Toward Warmer Suns, for all the monumental chill.
"Reconstructions " ran at the Museum of Modern Art through May 31, 2021, "Monuments Now" in Socrates Sculpture Park through March 31.