The Getty Foundation announced $3.1 million for the preservation of Black modern architecture. The funds will go toward a new initiative from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a campaign launched by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2017. So far, the Action Fund has raised over $80 million for over 200 conservation projects.
The Getty Foundation’s grant will launch a two-year program to identify the work of Black modern architects and preserve those sites.
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“We must address the invisibility of generations of Black architects whose architectural genius, creativity, and ingenuity helped shape our national understanding of modernism,” Brent Leggs, executive director of the Action Fund and senior vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said in a statement.
In 2020, the Getty Research Institute and the University of Southern California School of Architecture acquired Black modern architect Paul Revere Williams‘s archive from his granddaughter. Williams was one of the most successful and well-known architects of his day — his projects included the homes of celebrities including Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball, and iconic Los Angeles locations like the Beverly Hills Hotel and El Mirador Hotels.
The new funding, however, will hopefully illuminate the contributions of Black architects who have been ignored by the field.
“It’s just who was writing the histories, who was defining modernism that determined who was included or excluded,” stated Mabel O. Wilson, an architecture professor and director of Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies. “This program will go a long way to expand our thinking around modernism and shed light on Black architects — like Robert Taylor, Amaza Lee Meredith, Vertner Tandy — whose work shaped modern architecture in the United States but have largely been left out of the history books.”
Vertner Tandy, New York’s first licensed Black architect, designed a home in Westchester County, New York, in the early 20th century for America’s first Black woman millionaire Madam C.J. Walker. In Virginia, Amaza Lee Meredith designed a home for herself in 1939 on the campus of Virginia State University, where she founded and chaired the art department. Although it was not her only work, Lee’s Azurest South house is a testament to mid-20th century architectural innovation.
Professor of Architecture at the University of Southern California Milton S. F. Curry stated, “The complex story of Modernism cannot be fully revealed without new research on its impacts in and on the Black communities that it has touched.”
Source: Hyperallergic.com