Native(s)

The Boston Architectural College (BAC) hosts the traveling exhibit, Native(s) by MacArthur Fellow, Walter Hood, in the accessible, public McCormick Gallery. Through this exhibit and accompanying public lecture, Hood probes how landscapes inform our notions of identity and belonging. Hood also asks fundamental questions about our relationships with changing environments, place inheritance, and decolonization and decarbonization. His work invites visitors and audiences to unearth erased daily and heroic narratives.

This exhibit will be open from August 21, 2024, through January 20, 2025.

The exhibit was originally created in response to Lesley Lokko’s call for the 2023 Venice Biennale to center Africa and the African diaspora in conversations about our constructed environments. It includes wooden artifacts, sectional drawings, and wallpaper depicting perspectives of landscapes and narratives. As the exhibit travels to the United States-first to the BAC and then to the University of Virginia (UVA)-it adapts to each host institution and context.

The exhibit and its complementary programming invites audiences to engage in dialogue with the themes explored by Hood through his landscape design and public art. Additional educational and community programming facilitated by the BAC cultivates a broader discourse about these themes in relation to the urban spaces we inhabit. This exhibit contributes to the emerging scholarship of spatial justice through restored narratives of place.

Native(s) poses critical questions and invites discourse about our emergent collective relationship with public and urban spaces, as well as our unequal ability to influence their creation. The BAC fosters this discourse through a strategic community partnership initiative in Boston, where issues of race, belonging, and design are central. The BAC’s Urban Design and Planning Pre-College Fellowship with the City of Boston engages Boston high school students in co-creating ancillary components of the Native(s) exhibit, resulting in a spatial justice-focused urbanism curriculum that can be shared with the BAC’s partners at UVA.

Be sure to join us Wednesday, October 31, at 6PM to hear Walter Hood speak on The Phillips Community and the International African American Museum as this year's featured Childs Memorial Lecturer.