On Reparations and the Possibility of Other Systems

Mabel O. Wilson teaches architecture and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, where she also serves as the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies. With her practice Studio &, she was a member of the design team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. Wilson has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) and Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012), and coedited the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?)—an advocacy project to educate the architectural profession about the problems of globalization and labor. For the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, she was cocurator of the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021).