Black – Still

Black — Still, a multi-sensory installation and its complementing programs explore narratives of wellness, access, and cultural expression with specific attention to marginalized communities. Rendered in simple, familiar materials, the project's reverential volume is responsive to various obstacles on, above, and beneath the courtyard’s ground, while its dark finish celebrates Black in a response to traditional and modernist notions in architecture predicated on whiteness. The volume shapes a space of joyous contemplation, sound-dampened from the adjacent noises of Wilshire Boulevard, offering shade, shelter, and a cooling mist during the summer months.

In addition to its cultivation of calm, Black — Still engages the underlying geological conditions of the M&A X Craft Contemporary Courtyard, where tar oozes and methane gas rises from the ground, elements originating from the adjacent La Brea Tar Pits and underground oil seeps. Throughout LA, this primordial matter pushes through human-made infrastructure. The project’s wall assemblies of inside-out lath and plaster reproduce a familiar form of material seepage and call attention to the formlessness and expansive potential of “surfacing.” Black — Still is be complemented by a series of public wellness events and workshops, center exchanges between creative practice and self- and community care practices.

Black — Still is a built work by enFOLD Collective.
Photographs courtesy of Sam Wadieh.