Mabel O. Wilson: Absence, Presence, and the Incomplete Archive
Mabel O. Wilson in conversation with Sean Anderson
Mabel O. Wilson, A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell, shares insights into her new and recent work with Associate Professor of Architecture Sean Anderson in advance of her weeklong visit to campus this spring and keynote lecture on March 7.
Mabel O. Wilson, A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell, and Professor of Architecture and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, has been widely recognized for her particular ability to thoughtfully, critically, and creatively disentangle complicated questions around race, historical narratives, archives, and the built environment, as well as to invite various publics into the thought process behind her often collaborative work. Wilson partnered with AAP architecture faculty Sean Anderson (B.Arch./B.S. ’96), among others, on the acclaimed and impactful Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America exhibition that opened at MoMA in 2021 after years of planning, and was a collaborator on the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia with AAP Dean J. Meejin Yoon and Eric Höweler (B.Arch. ’94, M.Arch. ’96). Last year, Wilson, Yoon, and Höweler regrouped to revisit parts of the archive — absent and present — behind the memorial to create unknown, unknown, an immersive installation included in the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.
“Mabel Wilson is a preeminent scholar whose powerful work reopens and reactivates the historical record, shedding new light on the past, calling into question our assumptions about the present, and revealing possible futures,” says Yoon. “Her intersecting methods as a historian, designer, and curator tell new stories, affirming a breadth of human experience that necessarily connects the past with the present moment. It is an honor and a pleasure to welcome Mabel to campus as A.D. White Professor-at-Large, and to our Cornell and AAP communities, where her contributions will no doubt add immense value for many years to come.”
Beyond Wilson’s curatorial and creative work, she has long been recognized for her scholarship on US History and African American and African Diaspora studies, for which she was recently awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the Berthold Leibinger Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. Her A.D. White Professors-at-Large keynote lecture, “Freedom and Unfreedom: The Construction of Washington City in the District of Columbia,” will be held on March 7 at 5:15 p.m. in Milstein Hall Auditorium.