SF/Arts Curator Insight

In this exciting new exhibition, the Museum of the African Diaspora brings together designs, artworks, and environments that center the global necessity for Black people to cultivate domestic interiors not only as spaces of revolutionary action, but also of radical joy and revolutionary rest. Liberatory Living: Protective Interiors and Radical Black Joy evokes bell hooks’ concept of “Homeplace,” or those concrete spaces which inspire that [particular] feeling of safety, arrival, and homecoming—reminiscent of the warmth and
belonging she experienced at her grandmother's home. Also calling upon Elizabeth Alexander's notion of the "Black interior," curator Key Jo Lee explores ideas of space as physical manifestations of room for Black Joy. Not to be missed, Liberatory Living features sixteen contemporary designers and artists whose atmospheric works all question what a space might require to dismantle destructive colonial legacies and hold Radical Black Joy without fetishizing Black strength and resilience.