The Space welcomes artist & scholar Mabel O. Wilson

​​Cultural historian, architectural designer, and curator, Mabel O. Wilson teaches architecture and Black studies at Columbia University, where she also serves as the director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies. With her practice Studio&, she was a member of the design team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. Wilson has authored of Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016), Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012), and co-edited the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?)—an advocacy project to educate the architectural profession about the problems of globalization and labor. For The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, she was co-curator of the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021). Exhibitions of her work have been featured at the Venice Biennale, Art Institute of Chicago, Istanbul Design Biennale, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum’s Triennial, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and SF Cameraworks. Her work is in the collection of SFMoMA and the Architekturmuseum der TU Mūnchen.

Opening the Forum lecture series on January 31, is Mabel O. Wilson’s lecture, the inaugural event of Spring 2022. Professor Wilson will be introduced by the Founding Director of The Space for Creative Black Imagination, Dr. Raél Jero Salley.  

This event is produced as a partnership between The Space for Black Creative Imagination and MICA’s First Year Experience: Forum I and II, and the Unmaking Racism Minor Program. MICA’s First Year Experience (FYE): Forum I and II is a year-long course sequence that includes a themed Guest Lecture Series curated for the benefit of the entire freshman cohort. In 2022, the curriculum and speakers are designed to emphasize Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Globalization (DEIG) and are dedicated to our beloved FYE Faculty Fletcher Mackey who passed away last summer.  

Mabel O. Wilson’s lecture will cover all three of the Forum themes for Spring 2022: Experimentation, Transformation, and Integration.