Mabel Wilson

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, where she also serves as director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and co-director of Global Africa Lab. Wilson has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016), Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012), and co-edited the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). With her practice Studio&, she is a member of the architectural design team that recently completed the award-winning Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?)—an advocacy project educating the architectural profession about the problems of globalization and labor. For the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, she co-curated the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021). She is currently developing the manuscript for her next book Building Race and Nation: Slavery, Dispossession, and U.S. Civic Architecture.