Amber Wiley, the Matt and Erika Nord Director of the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites and Presidential Associate Professor of Historic Preservation at Weitzman, has written a survey of African American Architecture for Grove Art Online, spanning the structures built by enslaved Africans during the antebellum period to the work of contemporary Black architects. The article contributes to the publisher’s multi-year project to update and expand their scholarship on African American art.
In an Instagram post, Wiley writes this short and purportedly simple project was one of her hardest. “Unlike African American music or visual arts, this topic has not received a significant amount of scholarship.”
African American music and visual arts, she explains, share characteristics and are easier to categorize. Architecture, by contrast, is often categorized by style, and buildings constructed by members of the African diaspora in the Unites States do not share a definable aesthetic.
“The subject itself is a matter of interpretation and up for debate.” With limited space, however, Wiley says that her focus became straightforward to documenting what people did. The survey begins with the ways African architectural styles and technologies were adapted under enslavement, and continues to outline some of the most important Black architects and buildings through antebellum, the professionalization of the field in the early 20th century, and ending in contemporary practice.
Wiley says, “In preparation for this new reference entry for Grove, I wrote three times as much as what could actually be published, and had twice as many illustrations than what was allowed. But this is a start.”
The Grove Dictionary of Art is the leading online resource on all aspects of the visual arts, with 30,000 signed and peer-reviewed articles contributed by nearly 7,000 international scholars.
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