Episode 15

J. Yolande Daniels is an Associate Professor in Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Architecture and a fellow of the Independent Study Program of the Whitney American Museum of Art in studio practice and cultural studies. Daniels’ practice combines independent design-research and architecture and design in studioSUMO, which she co-founded in 1995. Daniels’ work explores the spatial effects of race and gender in the built environment by revealing spatial narratives of resistance and autonomy. Daniels’ work has been exhibited widely including most recently in the 18th Venice Biennale Architecture Exhibition.

In 2021 her project Black City: the Los Angeles Edition was featured in the exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Along with her fellow Reconstructions exhibitors, she is a cofounding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective.

This is an evergreen conversation, focusing on Yolande’s Los Angeles based research. We recorded in 2021 when Yolande was living in L.A. before moving to teach at MIT and shortly before the opening of her show at the MoMA. Yolande’s Black City project continues to expand. Learn more about the project here and follow on Instagram for upcoming venues.

 “As I started to do research, the narratives that I found had to do with the agency of the inhabitants and how they built community focusing on their power to shape the spaces around them. …

African Americans are often made to feel that we have no history or that our history is only sorrow, but the people who were making the history, they were fighting all the time to realize good things for themselves and for their family and for others. That's what I see in these stories and I want others to see them too.” - J. Yolande Daniels, MoMA, 2020