Project Title: Memorial of the Christie Street African Burial Ground

Project Location: M’finda Kalunga Garden, New York City

Date: 2023

Role: Project Designer

Collaborator: Kami Beckford (graphic illustration and concept development)

About:

Submission for the Christie Street African Burial Ground Memorial call for Artists by FABNYC.

In the spirit of sharing, learning and exploration, we are proposing a piece centered around the Adrinka symbol Nea onnim no sua a ohu— the full meaning of the symbol comes from a proverb that says “one who does not know can know from learning”. We wanted to connect this art piece to an African art form that is rooted in storytelling, cultural heritage and knowledge sharing. The Adinkra symbols come from Ghana, West Africa – a place where many enslaved African people were stolen from and brought to the shores of New York City.

Art is a learning medium by nature. In our conceptual design, we explore art as a tool for learning, and how art can carve out a physical learning space in the garden. We see our permanent sculpture creating a physical outdoor space that can hold different programs and activities.

The form of this sculpture uses the Neo Onnim Adrinka symbol. It plays with illusion - looking at the sculpture directly on, you would see the symbol in its entirety as a 2D shape. However, as you approach the sculpture from different angles, it explodes out into different pieces. These pieces are different types of furniture and shelters - chairs and benches, tables, walls, small stages - extracted from the symbol lines, there are many possibilities for arrangement in the garden. Benches and tables could be a place for a meeting or reflecting, walls with shelves can serve as gallery walls or space for altars, and the entire piece could be a stage for performance art.

Project Location: Brooklyn, New York

Client: GrowHouse Design + Development Group , Urban Design Forum

Partners: Design/Planning Team:

Immanuel Oni (Liminal - Design Renderings),

Deena Darby (Project Management),

Kami Beckford (Graphic Design),

Jeff Shumaker (Partners in Public Design - Design Support)

Date: 2023-2024

Role: Designer / Planning Strategist

About:

Creative Urban Alchemy was selected as the project lead for the Urban Design Forum Local Design Center RFP to support and partner with GrowHouse Design and Development Group to develop a community driven approach to public art, and memorialization at the Flatbush African Burial Ground and an activation plan for a Black History + Heritage Corridor connecting historic sites of Black Brooklyn.

The design of the Dikenga Pavillion combines Central African cosmology and West African symbology into a form that celebrates and creates space for community rest and ritual gathering. The gabion enclosure presents an opportunity for participatory art, youth skill building and a community crafted gravestone that carries on a life of its own.

Community Engagement Session

Youth Engagement Session

Design Process

Design Team

More information on the Local Center Initiative

Project Location: Helsingborg, Sweden

Client: Mayors’ Office of Helsingborg

Date: 2019 - 2022

Role: Global Advisory Board Member

About:

Served on the global advisory board for the Helsingborg, Sweden 2022 expo (H22 Expo) - an innovation, welfare, and urban development initiative using public space to showcase solutions for a more smart, sustainable and equitable city.

Advising on co-creation strategies led to the crafting of a design competition for interactive pavilions in public space centering equality and inclusion.

Images Shown:

“The Peoples Voice”: a collaborative public art project promoting visitors to leave a message about equality in the pavilion to contribute to an evolving installation by students at the Lund University School of Architecture. More on the people’s voice

OPS! Box play: Public Forum Stations that generate renewable energy and provide Wi-Fi access and invites people of all backgrounds to use the space for collaborative thinking. More on Box Play

Initiative website: https://h22.se/en/

Exhibition Location: Flatbush Central Marketplace; Brooklyn, NY

Funders: Black Artists & Designers Guild, The Architectural League, New York State Council on the Arts

Date: 2023 - 2024

Partners: Antoinette Cooper of Black Exhale

Role: Artist, Designer

About:

Liberation is a spatial practice. Mario Gooden – Dark Space

Reparations in Public Space is a collaborative project between Ifeoma Ebo of Creative Urban Alchemy and Antoinette Cooper of Black Exhale. Through community-engaged design workshops, speculative architectural visualizations, and poetic narratives, this exhibition explores how public spaces can be transformed from sites of collective trauma into platforms for healing, repair, and Black joy.

The exhibition will showcase the outcomes of a participatory design workshop where community members co-created a spatial design manifesto and generated ideas using the artificial intelligence platform MidJourney. These visions will then be developed into a series of architectural designs by Ifeoma Ebo that re-imagine existing public sites in Brooklyn—the Flatbush African Burial Grounds—associated with historical racial trauma. Alongside these designs, Antoinette Cooper will present poetry and narratives inspired by visits to African Burial Grounds across New York City, including the Flatbush African Burial Ground, Van Cortlandt Park, the M’Finda Kalunga Community Garden, and the African Burial Ground National Monument. These literary works will provide a deeper emotional and historical context, honoring the stories of those laid to rest and connecting their legacies to present-day struggles for space, dignity, and recognition.

Together, the speculative designs and poetic narratives aim to change spatial narratives and envision public spaces as sacred places for remembrance, emotional release, intergenerational connection, and collective imagining of more equitable futures.

Presentation to the Architectural League

Showcased in the online exhibition Shifting Ground by the Architectural League of NY

The Streets are Talking is a series that explores the power of public space to serve as a platform for the amplification of marginalized voices. Each image reflects a lesson from the BlackSpace Manifesto, a collection of principles created by the BlackSpace Urbanist Collective as a capacity-building tool for built environment professionals working in Black communities.

Reckon with the past to build the future.

When the words from our mouth fail to last, the public realm continues to say the names of Black bodies that have perished at the hands of law enforcement.

Manifest the future.

Street art captures the essence of our collective hopes, trauma, & dreams.

Protect & strengthen culture.

When we are tired & weary & can no longer cry out, art on the built edifice continues to shout.

Seek people at the margins.

When the streets cry out that Black Lives Matter, they provide a platform for the youth to fight for their rights.

Plan with / design with.

The #OccupyCityHall movement has used public space as a canvas to express collective frustration & contestation of power.

Create circles, not lines.

The pandemic revealed the face of our true heroes, who exemplify extreme courage in their daily lives.

Celebrate, catalyze, & amplify Black joy.

During the height of the pandemic, when we felt isolated in our homes, the Apollo Theatre, a historic venue for the African American community to showcase its talent, used its signage as a way to wish the community well.

Choose critical connections over critical mass.

The public street has been used as a tool to celebrate a message & amplify a critical organization in the anti-racism movement.

Collage series exploring the culture of the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria and their story of resilience during the Nigerian-Biafran Civil War.

Series chronicles the worship experience of an African diasporic and spiritually rooted intentional community in East New York, Brooklyn.

Showcased in the online exhibition Sacred Justice: Protest, Prayer and Public Space as a part of the Hindsight Conference.

Isaiah 1 v 17: Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed (NIV) Activism is a form of protest against forces of oppression in the physical realm and similarly one can perceive prayer as a form of protest against evil in the spiritual realm. Through visual storytelling this exhibition explores the power of collective prayer and acts of protest in the public realm. This digital collection aims to spark curiosity among built environment professionals on how urbanism and the public realm can play a role in facilitating collective action in and for communities of color.

Black spaces were historically born out of the need to create safe places of refuge for Black people. We are living in an era where Black spaces are under attack socially, economically and culturally. Gentrification, in particular, is one urban force that is systematically erasing cherished Black assets, displacing honored Black leaders and wiping out Black culture - all critical adhesives to the tapestry of Black neighborhoods. Today and for our future city Black spaces will continue to be necessary social infrastructure for the cultural, social and economic development of Black communities.

Artwork as part of @NYCxDESIGN’s 2021 #OdetoNYC poster collection, re-connecting people to the heartbeat of NYC’s design scene.

With this year’s theme of “Our Future City,” I designed a custom poster expressing my vision for the future of NYC, reflecting new beginnings and inspiring hope. Find my design as part of the #OdetoNYC collection displayed in several locations throughout the city–from design showrooms, retail stores, cultural institutions and studios to digital projections at @westfieldworldtradecenter and on board the @nyc_ferry fleet. Visit nycxdesign.org to explore the complete collection and see where you can find the posters in-person.

The poster collection is now available for purchase on @posterhousenyc’s website, with proceeds going to Silicon Harlem (@siliconharlem).

An exploration of cultural urbanism in public space imagined using MidJourney - a generative artificial intelligence program that generates images from natural language descriptions

This photo series was funded by the Cornell University Robert James Eidlitz fellowship - a travel grant for alumni of the Cornell University School of Architecture. An annual award granted to one alumni of the architecture program for travel and research to supplement professional training. The exhibition explores the nature of architecture as cultural artifact in the city of Salvador da Bahia in Northern Brazil. The research focused on the hybridity of Portuguese and African influences in sacred and secular architecture.