ARCHITECTURE & THE AFRICAN DIASPORA: A CONVERSATION

DEJHA CARRINGTON is an independent curator and co-founder of Commissioner. Her work focuses on supporting artists and building models for access in the arts. In addition to running Commissioner, a collaborative program that brings together emerging collectors and artists in their cities, she consults on social impact initiatives and teaches at the New World School of the Arts. She also serves as an advisory committee member of Miami-Dade Art in Public Places and New York University’s Center for Black Visual Culture. She’s based in Miami Beach.

GERMANE BARNES is a designer in residence for the Opa-locka Community Development Corporation and senior lecturer and director of the Community, Housing & Identity Lab (CHIL) at the University of Miami School of Architecture. His research and design practice investigates the connection between architecture and identity, examining architecture's social and political agency through historical research and design speculation. He is part of a group of architects, designers, artists, and writers who have contributed to Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (MoMA), a call for architects to reconceive and reconstruct the built environment, rather than continue giving shape to buildings, infrastructure, and urban plans that have embodied and sustained anti-Black racism in the United States. The book, which includes a broad range of essays by curators and prominent scholars from diverse fields, and a portfolio of new photographs by the artist David Hartt, is a "field guide" to the 2021 exhibition of the same name at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

OLALEKAN JEYIFOUS is an artist whose work reimagines social spaces that examine the relationships between architecture, community, and the environment. He has exhibited at venues including the Studio Museum in New York's Harlem, the Vitra Design Museum, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, and the Museum of Modern Art, where his work is part of its permanent collection. For more than a decade, he has created large-scale installations for a variety of public spaces and was co-commissioned to design a monument for Congressperson Shirley Chisholm as part of the city of New York's "She Built NYC" initiative. Jeyifous has garnered numerous awards, including the Silver Lion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.