J. Yolande Daniels, “Ghost Map 01, 19C (1850-1899)”, 2021/2025. Digital image, 177 x 103 in. Courtesy the artist
J. Yolande Daniels: To A Future Space-Time
April 5, 2025 – September 6, 2025
In Collaboration With California African American Museum
April 5, 2025, 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
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For over three decades, the works of multidisciplinary artist J. Yolande Daniels have explored the fraught relationship between race, power, and time, as well as how these concepts shape the built environment. Infusing her projects with sociological and architectural research, Daniels reveals the supremacist and racialized lenses that shape Western customs, laws, theories, and spatial artifacts, such as institutions, cities, maps, and dictionaries. In her first solo exhibition, J. Yolande Daniels: To A Future Space-Time, Daniels reappropriates several of these cultural tools—the timeline, atlas, and glossary—to make clear the defiant and future-oriented nature of African American community building in Los Angeles, whose history has largely been erased.
To A Future Space-Time is an ode to the origins of Black autonomy and positions the cultivation of Black space as a strategy that has always existed alongside, beneath, and beyond racist customs and laws. The exhibition guides visitors through a fluid mapping of the ways Black people have created their own space-time coordinates, their own measures of distance, and their own cartographic possibilities, without negotiating with the colonizer—without his customs or clock.
J. Yolande Daniels: To A Future Space-Time is curated by Zion Estrada, interdisciplinary artist-researcher and founder of Black Discourse, and is co-presented by CAAM and A+P as part of CAAM at A+P, a five-year collaboration.
J. Yolande Daniels, “Sugar Hill Dictionary Plate”, 2020/2025 (digital render). Courtesy the artist
J. Yolande Daniels, “3 (Silent) Meditations on Black Reconstruction, Reparations, and Abolition”, 2021/2025 (still). Video, 25 min. Courtesy the artist
J. Yolande Daniels, “3 (Silent) Meditations on Black Reconstruction, Reparations, and Abolition”, 2021/2025 (still). Video, 25 min. Courtesy the artist
J. Yolande Daniels, “3 (Silent) Meditations on Black Reconstruction, Reparations, and Abolition”, 2021/2025 (still). Video, 25 min. Courtesy the artist
J. Yolande Daniels, “Constellation of African Diasporic Women”, 2023 (still). Video, 41:07 min. Courtesy the artist
Educational Resources
Schedule a guided tour
A+P’s education program welcomes teachers, students and art enthusiasts to explore and engage with A+P’s museum-curated exhibitions. Interested in bringing your group to A+P? Free guided tours are available to schedule Tuesday–Friday, 11:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Further Research
Biography
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J. Yolande Daniels is a co-founding design principal of studioSUMO, an associate professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a founding board member of the Black Reconstruction Collective. Daniels’s work includes building designs, interiors, exhibitions, writing, and design research that has been published and exhibited in cities including New York, Tokyo, Rome, and Venice.
Daniels is a National Academician, a Rome Prize fellow in Architecture, and a fellow of the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art in studio practice and cultural studies. She received architecture degrees from Columbia University and City College of New York. Her independent design research explores and represents the spatial effects of power in the built environment and narratives of resistance and autonomy.
Iterations of the BLACK City: Editions have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Studio Museum in Harlem and published in Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America; In Search of African American Space: Redressing Racism; White Papers, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, and Culture; and Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor.
Zion Estrada is an interdisciplinary artist researcher. Her work flows between archival assemblage filmmaking, sonic collage production, and experiential design, centering human and more-than-human (re)connection. Estrada’s experimental collage language in film and sonic works often use layering of field recordings, found sounds, and carefully curated sound clips that score a line of discourse that complicate temporality, history, and meaning making. Her practice is informed by the palimpsest and Pauline Oliveros’s concept of Deep Listening.
Her most recent experimental film work has been exhibited in the 2023 Chicago Architectural Biennale, 2024 Rockaway Film Festival, 2024 BAM Black Ante-Aesthetic review, curated by Alfreda Cinema, and the 2025 Home Land exhibition public programming with Save Art Space, curated by Zehra Zehra and Kilo Kish. She was a selected exhibitor for the 2024 Ghetto Biennale in Jacmel, Haiti, and participated in the 2023 MIT Worlding Project with her ongoing Wild Grass Research Practice.
She is the founder of Black Discourse, an oral tradition studio, which has been the lead curator of the traveling exhibition Unmonument, in partnership with the Black Reconstruction Collective, supported by the Open Society Foundation.