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.
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.
Watch the Lectures
Over four lectures, Wilson presents key themes and examines buildings, works of art, and other historical documents through the interplay of race and the construction of national identity.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.
About the Speaker
Top image: Edward Savage, The Washington Family (detail), 1789–1796, oil on canvas, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1940.1.2