2016. That was the first time New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired a work by a Black designer for its architecture and design collection. The object was a stereoscopic image viewer developed by Charles Harrison. And, yes, you read that correctly: MoMA, an institution whose architecture and design department goes back to 1932, didn’t acquire a single work by a Black architect or designer until the tail end of the Obama administration.
That omission, along with the ways the museum has engaged — and not engaged — the ideas of Black architects during its history, was the subject of an illuminating essay by architectural scholar and cultural historian Mabel O. Wilson in the hefty tome “Among Others: Blackness at MoMA,” published in 2019.
Read more at the Los Angeles Times.