A wheeled off-kilter black-steel framework, among the first items the visitor encounters on the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art, could be taken as an industrial remnant mounted with sails to carry it away.
A closer examination of the work — “The Refusal of Space” by architect and professor Mario Gooden — reveals it as an armature to document protests and host short videos on 1960s civil rights actions in Nashville. Its wheels evoke the trolley lines built in 1905 by African-American businessmen in response to a law requiring segregated streetcars. White interests sabotaged the lines, forcing them to close.
In its haunting ambiguity, “The Refusal of Space” signals that MoMA’s new exhibition, “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,” is not the polite parade of progress that is the standard fare of exhibits on architecture. “Mario’s protest machine is about mobility,” says Mabel Wilson, a professor at Columbia University’s school of architecture and a co-organizer of the exhibition, which runs through May 31. “The logic of the ghetto is to limit you. It says you cannot go here, or do this. If freedom is about that ability to move, then a protest machine that is mobile is important.”
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