Homework: Architectures of Belonging

Menna Agha
Auclair
Beverly Buchanan
Sonia Louise Davis
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs & Gabri Christa
Lonnie Holley
Ajamu Kojo
Zenobia Lee
Zyanya

The founding of the original Weeksville community teaches us that the intimate act of building a home was connected to the public act of claiming a space in the wider society. Black men owning property valued at $250 or more secured the right to vote. But property alone does not make a home.

“Homework” borrows its title from the assertions of scholar Sarah Ahmed, who tells us, “we have much to work out from not being at home in a world.” This labor, “work on and in our homes” seeks the transformation Audre Lorde demanded, requiring new tools to overturn the structures sheltering inequality and domination.

Dwelling in the subjectivity that enacts such transformation, the artists exhibited in Homework, inhabit that first native land, the domestic sphere, and the thresholds between inner and outer worlds. Displacement and yearning appear in these works, alongside gestures and structures that lay claim to space, determined to rebuild.

Presenting an international, multigenerational group, Homework is an invitation to the dream houses in which we can reimagine where we live, and how.