Keynote 3:00 - 4:30 pm ET
°®¶¹app is pleased to present this year's Symposium keynote discussion, “Modern at the Crossroads,” moderated by Board President Theo Prudon, where we consider how race and the Africian American experience has been impacted by the Modern Movement. We will look at the origins of how history is determined to be significant or valuable, that may in turn lead us to reconsider what we preserve. Mabel O. Wilson will begin with the address with her presentation, "Who's Modern? Blackness and MoMA’s Architecture and Design Archive." Jack Pyburn will build on this discussion with his talk, "What's Modern? African American Environments in the time of Modernism."
Gain new perspectives to considering history, bias, and the resulting formation and reformations of this contextual framework based on new evidence. Explore methodologies that consider and visualize untold histories through built work, not only through sifting out its stories, but in its matching of bricks and mortar.
How can the profession build a more equitable preservation practice that looks both backwards and forwards productively? Are new resources required? How does the materiality that creates the physical presence of a site, connect history, space, and the user? How does privilege play into history and representation? What steps can we take to discover and embrace lost cultural resources to make invisible communities visible to the public?
“Modernity has built its superior culture through its forms, aesthetics, and practices to place it above and beyond the primitive, savage, folk, and the racial other” – Mabel O. Wilson
“Buildings need to be looked at as vessels for an exceptional history” – Jack Pyburn
