In her seminal text The Black Interior, Elizabeth Alexander describes a reality beyond what is currently perceptible to the senses. One constructed and cultivated by black people away from the scrutiny of those who try to invade and dictate both the physical and spiritual domains of their existence. Pulling inspiration from Alexander’s collection of essays, Black Interiors: Envisioning a Place of Our Own explores the black aesthetic and psyche by drawing attention to interior spaces as sites of liberation and creative expression.

Behind the façades of Loïs Mailou Jones’s “Old House Near Frederick Virginia” (1942) or the southern “shacks” which inspired Beverly Buchanan’s “Untitled (Red Ladder)” (1995) are domestic spaces that are nurtured and protected. Within these enclosed walls African Americans re-envision space as freedom, fashioning their homes to reflect their personal values and cultural memory. The interior of the home—along with all who dwell within—is sacred for African Americans, who have consistently wrestled with the impermanence of place perpetrated by chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and gentrification.

This exhibition showcases artwork as well as archival documents including: photographs, correspondence, memorabilia, and newspaper articles related to the continuous efforts of those within the African Diaspora to designate and create communities of their own within the United States and abroad. Artists from Clark Atlanta University Art Museum and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art’s permanent collections offer a glimpse into private rooms of the home to depict precious moments of solitude and contemplation, while personal letters, family photos, and diary entries collected and preserved by the Atlanta University Center Archives Research Center disclose intimate details of life as an African American.  By unpacking the politics and poetics of the often racialized and gendered space within and around the household, the works included critically examine how our social relations and cultural practices are shaped.

Journalist Thomas H. Johnson describes in his New York Times article, “Black on Black,” the experiences of African Americans moving abroad to African countries:

While the reasons differed from person to person, many African Americans desired to permanently relocate to African countries during the 19^th and 20^th century. The “Back to Africa” movement, which originated in the United States during the 19^th century, spurred this desire by encouraging blacks to “return” to the continent their ancestors were taken from, due to transatlantic slave trade. The British colony of Sierra Leone, a free settlement for black people throughout the African diaspora which had remained loyal to the British during the Revolutionary War, would serve as a model for the settlement of Liberia in 1821 by the American Colonization Society (ACS). Prior to the settlement of Liberia, Paul Cuffe, a black merchant from New England, brought 38 settlers to Sierra Leone in 1816, marking the first formal migration of African Americans to Africa. Though ACS later assisted in the emigration of thousands of African Americans to Liberia, for the most part, the organization was opposed by African Americans who viewed ACS’s goal “as a means to get rid of them,” (Blyden, 2004).

Malcolm X, also known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, was a prominent African American leader and influential figure in the Nation of Islam who advocated for Black Nationalism rather than racial integration. Malcolm X traveled extensively throughout the country spreading this doctrine until his Pilgrimage to Mecca shifted his perspective on the separation of black and white Americans. In “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” Malcolm X reflects on his time in the “Muslim world” and describes the letters he penned to dear friends and family members as well as a letter he sent to his assistants in Harlem to be duplicated and distributed to the press. In it he writes:

C. Eric Lincoln, who was a leading scholar on the Black Church and Black Religious studies in the United States, received numerous postcards from Malcolm X during his travels abroad in the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and London. In one of the exhibited postcards below Malcolm X writes: “If more of our ‘leaders’ and ‘opinion-makers’ visit Africa it would broaden their scope, and our struggle for freedom and human dignity would rise to new dimensions.”

What do the ways we adorn our bodies or the walls of our home convey about our inner selves, dreams, and desires? How do the objects we collect and choose to display speak to our existence or lived experiences? And, as Alexander questions, “is there a particular power of the visual to make possible or imaginable that which is not the present reality?”  The living room, as Alexander describes is the “not” space, it is “not the bedroom, or the bathroom, or the kitchen,” but rather a presentational or performative space within the private realm where one welcomes and entertain guests. This is the room where black imagination manifests itself through décor and objects on view.

In the literal interior spaces of black people’s homes, Alexander states, “the self is made visible” through the conscious act of collecting and displaying objects affixed with personal memory and family history.  This is made apparent in Henri Linton’s “Easy for One Hard for Two” (1965) as well as the photographs taken in Grace Towns Hamilton’s family home and the dorm rooms of Atlanta University students. The subjects in each painting and photo are positioned within their home, surrounded by items that reflect who they are and what they hold dear. Whether a humble one-room shack, a multi-level mansion, or a dorm room these dwellings are sites of transformative freedom housed with unbridled black imagination.

In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, bell hooks reminisces on the times she spent in her grandmother’s home, learning how to “see” through the objects that shaped her childhood. She states:

hooks learned to recognize herself by watching her grandmother move within the house she took care of and cared for. Frank Neal’s “Oppression” (1947) and Otis Galbreath’s “Let Bygones be Bygones” (1964), both illustrate the dynamics between performer and spectator in the private sphere hooks so poetically describes. The two paintings portray young boys observing older women, presumably the matriarchs of their family, in domestic spaces. Dressed in a long sleeve blouse and floor length skirt, the woman in Galbreath’s painting hunches over her needlepoint while a young boy, who sits across from her, intently watches her movements, just as the young boy in Neal’s painting studies his mother’s down casted face. Both women seem to either not notice or not care that they are under the watchful eyes of their young ones and continue to perform the daily labors of homemaker.

The titles of both paintings allude to the mental and emotional stress endured by those in marginalized communities, yet one image depicts a somber moment of succumbing to the pressures of the world while the other illustrates the necessity of letting go of past grievances to focus on current concerns.

African American women have been fixtures within the American domestic sphere. They have been expected to maintain and upkeep their own homes as well as others. From enslaved African American women who were regulated to working in the “big house,” mammies, and wet-nurses to (often under-) paid maids, domestic workers, and nannies, these women carried much of the emotional burden of caretaker and homemaker. Women such as Elizabeth “Lizzie” McDuffie, who worked as a White House maid from the 1920’s until the 1940’s and wrote of her experiences in her unpublished memoir “The Back Door of the White House.” Or, others, like Mrs. Thetis Gerald, a North Carolina “Farm wife,” who “cooked a six o’clock breakfast, fed the farm’s heifer, two mules and 12 hogs, driven a tractor, through the cucumber patch and mended a torn pair of pants for her husband, Wilson” every morning.

In addition to cooking, cleaning, tending to the farm and mending her family’s clothes, Mrs. Gerald also was a co-chairman of the state’s Home Demonstration Council, a Department of Agriculture federal extension program. The national and local Home Demonstration Councils, established during the early twentieth century, offered practical demonstrations in home economics and agriculture. The demonstrations taught women farmers updated methods for accomplishing their household obligations and encouraged them to improve their families’ living conditions through home improvements and labor-saving devices.

Official task forces and grassroots organizing brought together both government officials as well as community leaders to form committees to address concerns relating to the physical safety and mental well-being of those most affected.  The Committee to Stop Children Murders, chaired by Camille Bell (mother of murder victim Yusuf Bell), laid out several of their intentions in a 1981 letter, which included addressing potential violators of children rights, counseling families affected by tragedy, and working to prevent the physical, emotional, moral or educational destruction of children nationwide. Black Atlantans mobilized together to create and provide resources to counteract both the immediate and long term effects of the reign of terror afflicted on the city. Workshops and conferences such as “I Am My Brother’s Keeper,” held at the Atlanta University Center, sought to both identify signs and symptoms of stress in young black children as well as train parents, teachers, and social workers on how to effectively work through their trauma.

Although the effects of Atlanta’s missing and murdered children are still felt today, it is evident that great community efforts went into protecting the neighborhoods, homes, and spaces they occupied. Collectively they did not cease to react but sought to rebuild and re-envision a place of their own even in the face of “irreducible danger.”

Oscar Harris, a renowned architect and artist, kept record of the construction progress of the Atlanta home he both designed and has lived in since 1991:

Harris, like many represented within this exhibit, envisioned a space that was not yet apparent and created a place that was distinctively their own. The homeplace, whether in its metaphysical understanding or physical construct, is a site for creative freedom and liberation.

Even when the troubles of the world creep into the far corners of the home or dark recesses of the mind, the private interior (in reference to place or self) allows for intimate moments of solitude, contemplation, and self-affirmation. Here, the black body is sovereign over the space it occupies and designates as its own. It is within the constructed boundaries of the physical home that the self is granted space to be free, real, and complex.