Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern: Architecture and the Black American Middle Class

by Jacqueline Taylor

The extraordinary life and work of architect Amaza Lee Meredith, and the role modernism and material culture played in the aspiring Black American middle class of the early twentieth century.

Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern tells the captivating story of Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black woman architect, artist, and educator born into the Jim Crow South, whose bold choices in both life and architecture expand our understanding of the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, while revealing the importance of architecture as a force in Black middle-class identity. Through her charismatic protagonist, Jacqueline Taylor derives new insights into the experiences of Black women at the forefront of culture in early twentieth-century America, caught between expectation and ambition, responsibility and desire.

Central to Taylor’s argument is that Meredith’s response to modern architecture and art, like those of other Black cultural producers, was not marginal to the modernist project; instead, her work reveals the tensions and inconsistencies in how American modernism has been defined. In this way, the book shines a necessary light on modernism’s complexity, while overturning perceived notions of race and gender in relation to the modernist project and challenging the notion of the white male hero of modern architecture.

Genres: Art, History

288 pages, Hardcover

Published November 28, 2023

Reviews

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1939, a black, lesbian art teacher designed a firmly modernist house for herself and her partner in Virginia; this book is mostly an assemblage of all the context necessary to explain how she managed to do it, rather than a close study of the house itself. This worked for me, but anyone who knows that context better than I do might want a lot more on the building, on where it fits and doesn't into how modern architecture is usually discussed, and its architect's views on architecture; but this is a fascinating piece of easily lost history in any case.

[G · Rating 5 out of 5]

black queer woman architect, hbcu professor, and art teacher... what more could a girl ask for? beautiful critical backdrop of the onset of new negro + great migration + modern woman ideals that coalesce into a deep study of how amaza lee meredith became a steward for african americans in the arts and social uplift through education and making of community spaces in the south. and not to forget that she was a direct student of modernist art and architecture and her work reveals tensions in american modernism and how the black middle class was essential to (complicating) the modernist project. 5/5 stars.