Modern Love: Celebrating Greensboro’s African American Modernist Architects

Description

These murals feature imagery of architecture by black architects working in Greensboro mid-century. The shaped metal canvases symbolize freedom and movement, lush purple backgrounds represent royalty and power, and the red and yellow patterns are taken from redline maps of Greensboro, where African Americans were isolated to living in areas that were deemed poor investment. The local work of these architects is superimposed in white, and the mural celebrates the resilience and trailblazing creativity of these architects despite the racism and roadblocks placed in their way. They saw Modernism “as a new beginning and a symbol of the promise of the future held for African Americans in the segregated South.”