Posted by The 74th A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts
Mabel O. Wilson
Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
professor and chair, Dept. of African American and African Diaspora Studies
Columbia University
Cultural historian, architectural designer, and curator Mabel O. Wilson addresses the history of slavery and dispossession in US civic architecture in this four-part series.
Over four lectures, Wilson presents key themes and examines buildings, works of art, and other historical documents through the interplay of race and the construction of national identity. She brings together historical research on the United States’ early civic architecture, including Richmond’s Virginia State Capitol, the White House, and the design of Washington, DC. Her talks explore the complex dichotomy between the founding ideals of these institutions and the reality of their construction.
***Before this final lecture, there will be a reception honoring Prof. Wilson at Zaytinya at 11 am. It is free for members, but you need to register HERE***
Program:
All sessions are on Sundays in March at 2pm EST. For detailed information about each session, see below:
- March 9: I. The Architecture of “We the People”
Wilson explores the vision of statesman, architect, and planter Thomas Jefferson in designing Virginia’s new statehouse, a neoclassical building based on a Roman temple to symbolize and enable the power of “the people” to govern. She argues that by analyzing Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), which includes an aesthetic and intellectual appraisal of works by enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley and was written during the same period he designed the capitol, we can better understand the complex relationship between democratic ideals and racial difference that shaped the nation’s new civic architecture.
- March 16: II. The Measure of Freedom and Slavery
This talk follows Andrew Ellicott, a mathematician and surveyor, and his team including free Black surveyor Benjamin Banneker, on their 1791 survey of the boundaries for the new Federal Territory between Virginia and Maryland. If the new territory and its yet to be planned capital, Washington City, functioned as an architectural symbol of unity between the 13 states and their commitment to uphold and protect the tenets of liberty through self-governance, then how did Banneker’s presence on the surveying team represent divergent beliefs around the natural rights of humans, especially the right to freedom?
- March 23: III. “Wanted at the City of Washington. A number of slaves to labor…”
Through an exploration of governmental, commercial, and residential buildings constructed along F Street in Capitol Hill, this talk reveals the history of how enslaved and free Black laborers became essential to Washington City’s transformation from a verdant patchwork of plantations to a monumental capital. The story of Peter (last name unknown), a carpenter enslaved by James Hoban, an immigrant Irish architect and builder who designed and supervised the construction of the President’s House (today’s White House), sheds light upon how Hoban and his peers’ hard-fought freedom and wealth depended upon confining Black craftsmen like Peter to conditions of unfreedom. This lecture’s title is taken from an advertisement in the Maryland Herald and Eastern Shore Intelligencer (November 11, 1794).
- March 30: IV. The Metropolis of Unfreedom: Washington City
In the first two decades of Washington City’s establishment, what was life like for free and enslaved Black residents such as domestic Anne Williams, who eventually sued her enslaver for her family’s freedom? Piecing together the tragic story of Williams’s leap from the window of a notorious slave depot, which led to a lifetime of disability, requires traversing the spaces of the capital’s taverns, congressional halls, and city block interiors. This lecture will sift through the ways that Williams’s humanity was exploited by her enslavers, examining how her plight was commandeered by early slavery reformers like physician Jesse Torrey. Williams became a symbol of the evils of the slave trade and the irreconcilability of the free Black population into the nation’s citizenry, which catalyzed the formation of the American Colonization Society in 1816.
Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and professor and chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University. Wilson’s scholarship and projects have explored Black culture, race, and the built environment. She was a member of the design team for the award-winning Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. She also cocurated the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.