Stuckeman Architecture Professor Contributes to Mobile Public Art Installation

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Felecia Davis, Penn State associate professor of architecture in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, is contributing to a mobile art installation that helps memorialize the liberators of Black America as part of her involvement as a co-founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC).

Titled “Unmonument,” the installation consists of a matte-black, steel industrial lift and made its New York debut on Aug. 8 at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn. It will make its way to Syracuse, New York in October and to Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, in December before moving on to Los Angeles and Atlanta in 2025.

Along with Davis, fellow BRC cofounders Olalekan Jeyifous, Amanda Williams, Mitch McEwen, Sekou Cooke, J. Yolande Daniels and Emanuel Admassu are participants in the traveling installation that seeks not only to memorialize trailblazers in Black history — such as Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner and Toussaint Louverture — but also to challenge preconceived ideas about what monuments should look like.

The BRC focused on using the basic industrial lift for its “inherently and intentionally unspectacular structure” and because it’s “flexible, unprecious and moveable.” The group called it an infrastructure for “recognizing the community that surrounds it, a beacon to celebrate, to gather and to come together.”

The multi-site approach taken by the BRC takes inspiration from the Surrealist “exquisite corpse” game that was popular in the 1920s in which each participant would take a turn writing or drawing on a sheet of paper, folding it to conceal his or her contribution and then passing it to the next player for a further contribution. As such, “Unmonument” will be modified at each installation site it touches by engaging visitors in a “call and response” exercise.

“By adapting a refurbished maintenance lift as a mobile site of intervention and then sequentially passing it from one Black artist to another — location to location — the industrial object is transformed into a powerful yet accessible symbol of resilience and ingenuity,” said Jeyifous, who organized the installation in Brooklyn.

As the organizer of the January installation in Bellefonte, Davis is teaching an architecture elective course, ARCH 497, this fall in which the students will make a digital quilt — similar to the one Davis created to reflect the stories of Black residents of the Hill District in Pittsburgh as part of her involvement in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America” exhibit in 2021 — to tell the stories of Black influencers in the historical town in Centre County that will be displayed on the “Unmonument” installation.

Davis, director of the Computational Textiles Lab (SOFTLAB) in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, said the team is also able to project from the sculpture itself, so live shows or videos focusing on Black history in the area can be shown at specific times during the display time, should the students decide to do so.

“In general, it seems Bellefonte was a stop on the Underground Railroad and was a place where Black people could settle because the land was sold to them, so Bellefonte has an activist history,” said Davis. “Those known stories will most likely be included in the quilt panels, but it will be up to the students to select the stories they want to tell on their panels.”

Davis has partnered with Racine Amos, community engagement archivist and librarian at Penn State University Libraries; Julia Spicher Kasdorf, director of creative writing and professor of English in the College of the Liberal Arts; and Philip Ruth, senior historian and director of research at Cultural Heritage Research Services Inc., who are working on the Black History in Centre County project, to identify some of the stories that will be featured in the installation.

The project is scheduled to be installed, in a location yet to be determined, Dec. 13-15 during the Bellefonte Victorian Christmas celebration.

“The purpose of the installation is to understand what life was like as a Black or African American person in Bellefonte historically and, through that understanding, learn how the future could be shaped,” said Davis. “Even though the project seed is historical, the thinking is ‘What from this history can be used to build a future? What needs to happen?’ Designers are always working on things that are not yet present, so the project, in this sense, is historical and imaginary.”