great migration

Harlem, 2020 - under construction

*collaboration with artist Thomas Heath

Great Migration is an installation which seeks to conflate public and private community stakeholders, as well as architecture and painting, which fuse with the structure in an exercise of co-produced ‘contamination’. The collaborative piece is an outdoor eating and public programming pavilion - part of a civic response and economic rejuvination in wake of COVID-19, and sits at the confluence of Harlem’s historic Striver’s Row neighborhood, an important district for the heart of Harlem’s small business and arts community.

Reminiscient not only of migration and diasporatic themes and scope of Thomas’ work, which depicts scenes of the Black American diasporatic narrative from the middle passage into bondage, and subsequent historical narrative of Great Migration from the south to the Northern USA, itermingling motifs of cultural perserverence. The dialogue between painting and architectural form is a process that evokes other black modes of production such as jazz, which is sophisticated in it’s transgression of rhythm and structure.

Heath’s paintings are digitized, composed and ‘mapped’ onto the ‘topographic’ structure, overlaying and undermining the ‘order’ of the architecture with a second ‘geography’ that migrates from a street facade to the roof, creating a dynamic canopy and interior that is fully three-dimensional. The project is due to open Nov 21, 2020.