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The University of Virginia—designed by Thomas Jefferson and now recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site—was built and maintained by 4,000 or more enslaved men, women, and children. UVA’s powerful new Memorial to Enslaved Laborers honors the lives, labors, and resistance of the enslaved people who lived and worked at UVA at some point between 1817 and 1865.

This interview with members of the memorial’s design team will explore the history, form, and process behind the creation of the memorial. Panelists: Mabel Wilson, Meejin Yoon, Eric Höweler, and Eto Otitigbe, with U-M's Kristin Hass as interviewer. 

~   Eric Höweler, AIA, LEED AP,  is an associate professor in architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he teaches lecture courses and design studios with a focus on building technologies/integration. He is a co-founding principal of  Höweler + Yoon Architecture LLP, a research-driven, multidisciplinary design studio working between architecture, art, and media. HYA has a reputation for work that is technologically and formally innovative, and deeply informed by human experience, and a sensitivity to tectonics. 

Eto Otitigbe is a polymedia artist whose interdisciplinary practice investigates the intersections of race, power, and technology. With history as the foundation for exploration, Otitigbe sets alternative narratives into motion; creating spaces for people to experience a unique mixture of concepts. Otitigbe lives and works in Brooklyn, NY where is an Assistant Professor and Head of Sculpture in the Art Department of Brooklyn College.

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, a professor in African American and African diasporic studies, director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies, and co-director of the Global Africa Lab at Columbia University. She is trained in architecture and American studies, two fields that inform her work. Through her transdisciplinary practice Studio &, Wilson makes visible and legible the ways that anti-black racism shapes the built environment along with the ways that blackness creates spaces of imagination, refusal, and desire. 

J. Meejin Yoon, AIA FAAR, is an architect, designer, and educator, whose projects and research investigate the intersections between architecture, technology, and the public realm. Prior to joining the faculty at AAP, Yoon was at MIT for 17 years and served as the head of the Department of Architecture from 2014–18. Yoon is cofounding principal of Höweler and Yoon Architecture. 

Kristin Hass is associate professor of American culture and faculty coordinator for the Humanities Collaboratory at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1998) and Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall (2013). Her fields of study include visual culture, material culture, museum studies, memory, and 20th-century cultural history.

This is the first in a series of annual Art and Activism lectures as part of High Stakes Art, a project designed to enhance exhibitions and programming at the Institute for the Humanities Gallery. High Stakes Art and this lecture are made possible by a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Presented by the Institute for the Humanities and the U-M Arts Initiative.

The Future of Art Series is hosted by the U-M Arts Initiative as part of a two-year startup phase.