J. Yolande Daniels, “Ghost Map 01, 19C (1850-1899)”, 2021/2025. Digital image, 177 x 103 in. Courtesy the artist
IN CONVERSATION: J. YOLANDE DANIELS AND ZION ESTRADA
April 8, 2025
7:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
In Collaboration With
CALIFORNIA AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM
The work of multidisciplinary artist J. Yolande Daniels explores the fraught relationship between race, power, and time, as well as how these concepts shape the built environment. Her first solo exhibition, To A Future Space-Time, 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. Join Zion Estrada, exhibition curator, interdisciplinary artist-researcher, and founder of Black Discourse, and Daniels as they discuss the formation of this exhibition.
Speakers
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.
Other Programs in this Series
Fri
2
May
FIRST FRIDAYS EDUCATION TOUR: TO A FUTURE SPACE-TIME