Trained as an architect, Curry J. Hackett moves thoughtfully across disciplines and media to create public art projects and imagine alternative futures rooted in Southern ecologies. In the following conversation, Curry discusses the impact of his family and their land on his practice, how Black Studies is good for everybody, and his exhibition on view at the Ace Hotel Brooklyn through November 1.

Jessica Gomez Ferrer: How did you move from childhood curiosity and playing trombone to pursuing studies in architecture and urban design?

Curry J. Hackett: My mother exposed me to creative production, art, and music. She was the art teacher at my high school, and she also went to my high school in Farmville, Virginia. She’s a painter, so a lot of her paintings covered the walls of the house. Whenever we did family vacations, there was an art museum on the itinerary. My father was an engineer. In the ‘90s, he had a hi-fi stereo system so there was always a mixture of art and music happening in the house. Being the son of an artist and an engineer almost makes it obligatory to go to architecture school. 

Being in DC and at Howard when Obama got elected in the middle of my freshman year, there was this lush environment of creative production happening in the first four years of his presidency. I started dabbling with graphic design and illustration. Student government is taken really seriously at Howard, and I got commissioned to do some of my first illustrations for that kind of stuff.

Graphic design was my foray into how to meld design thinking into a visual form of expression. The music stuff was sitting in the background, but I was in the fine arts building at least as much as I was in the architecture building. I was in the marching band, the jazz band, a brass ensemble, and trombone choir. That juxtapositional way of being has informed the way that I approach design and art today.

Jessica: What role have kinkeeping and familial aesthetics played in your practice?

Curry: Just outside of Farmville is a farming village called Prospect. My family has about 100 acres of land there that we've had in our possession since the 1800s. That's where my grandmother's house is and that's where my mother was born. My mom was definitely the kinkeeper in the family. She was constantly reminding my sister and me of the family tree, how people were related, and where people lived.

When I got to Howard, most of my peers were from cities, even if they were from the South. When I would tell them about where I was from and how I grew up, they were surprised that we owned land. That was the first time I realized that we had something really special. Thinking about my family and upbringing is a permission structure to consider the aesthetics of land, time, space, and Southern ecologies. All of those things are bound up in the same way of thinking, and then that gets expressed in the various projects I take on.

Jessica: As an educator, what lessons are you trying to impart on students and what are the challenges and opportunities in teaching Media Studies right now?

Curry: The main thing that keeps coming back to me is something that I talked about a few years ago when I was co-teaching a studio, which is that Black Studies is good for everybody. 

Something that I reiterate to my students now — most of whom are not Black and not American — is that if you are interested in Disability Studies, Queer Studies, Women's Studies, environmental history, migration, or post-colonial theory, there is an intellectual home for you somewhere in the canon of Black Studies.

I use Black Studies as an invitation to gather as many people and disciplines on the syllabus. If we accept that invitation, then that means the output of the courses can be really expansive. I'm teaching a food and media class next semester, where we can make a cookbook instead of a white paper. I'm teaching a new class called Critical Noticing, which is an intro to urban studies, and we’ll be making catalogs.

I'm fortunate that my department is expansive about what Media Studies can mean. I feel at home from a pedagogical standpoint in a way that is different from when I was teaching architecture. Architecture, at least in the Western and American sense, has gotten so professionalized that the schools feel like they have to hit certain KPIs, which doesn't seem to be a primary concern in my department.

Jessica: Your exhibition, It Can Happen...Still Time to Try, is on view at the Ace Hotel Brooklyn with Field Meridians through November, and one of its central themes is thinking abundantly. Why is that mindset important to you?

Curry: It's a continuation of the work I was doing prior to the residency, thinking about moments in history and future alternative timelines where Black folks are willing and able to live with some degree of sovereignty and self-actualization, and to return to land-based modes of living.

LinYee Yuan, who is the founder of Field Meridians and the curator of the residency at the Ace, asked us to reach out to folks in our network to be in residence with us. I asked J.T. Roane,  whose work I learned about in grad school. He is also from Virginia and is trained as a historian. He splits his time at Rutgers working between Africana Studies and Geography, and also runs the Black Ecologies Lab there. I also invited the documentarian for that lab, Jona Alexander, who's a dope poet and filmmaker.

In our discussions about what we wanted to do, J.T. kept circling back to his research on June Jordan, the prolific writer, essayist, novelist, and poet who was born and raised in Brooklyn. It felt apt to consider her the protagonist in our research and residency. J.T. was insistent on asking questions about how we might think about June Jordan as a spatial thinker. She did a speculative project with Buckminster Fuller called the Skyrise for Harlem in the '60s. It was published in Esquire. She wrote several essays arguing for land reform and she even won the Rome Prize for Environmental Design, which is fascinating.

We have been trying to think about what it means to uplift gardening and land over property, and how we might show up in the world as citizens in Brooklyn if we were unconcerned with the logics of property and more concerned with a land-based mode of living that champions family, kinship, and interspecies relationships.

I created a set of collages based on a 3D model of our hotel room at the Ace Hotel that reimagines these scenes of Black domesticity, like a barbershop, funeral home, or a vacation Bible school program. J.T. and Jona conducted a beautiful body of fieldwork around Brooklyn that gathered interviews from Black gardeners. We also hosted Black Studies scholars to have conversations about Black queer kinship in the '70s and '80s, and how Blackness and former plantation land is tied up in the economics of trash. It’s all a curriculum for how we might think differently about land and how we might put June Jordan's thoughts about land reform into practice.

Jessica: You cut your teeth for over a decade in Washington DC on various public art projects. Can you talk about the impact of that city and those projects on you?

Curry: DC is the gift that keeps on giving. I lived there for twelve years; it became a chosen home after leaving Virginia, and I lived there until the pandemic. My first major permanent art project was the commemorative Howard Theatre Walk of Fame in 2018. After that, I worked with Patrick McDonough, a fellow educator and artist, to create color-coded infographics communicating historical and future flooding events. It was called the DC High Water Mark Project, and we worked with the DC Department of Energy and Environment on it. It was cool to work on a big cultural project and then work on a big ecological project. It sparked in my mind how I might be thinking about people and the environment in the same breath, and eventually gave me a vocabulary to use to shape my own practice.

It's always amazing to be able to come back to my chosen home and work with familiar faces. I was in a panel earlier this summer organized by the Commission of Arts and Humanities that gathered a bunch of artists for a two-day retreat and asked questions about what public art can look like in the city. Public art can be really fraught, especially depending on the place.

DC often gets described as a neoclassical paradise from an architecture standpoint, but DC was America's first predominantly Black city, aka Chocolate City. It is now thinking critically about what public art can look like and who it can serve. My public art projects and those conversations have all been powerful influences on how I've been thinking about the role of art, the role of creative production, and public space.