Public and Museum Installations

4MX Greenhouse

2018

4M Malcom X Greenhouse is an architectural and programmatic artwork built from an ideation of community holistic health. A greenhouse mimicking the shape of Malcolm X’s birth house built on his birth site’s foundation in Omaha, featuring spiritual/meditation programs, phytoremediation plant distribution and youth workshops focused on urban sustainability.

4MX Greenhouse is positioned at a high architectural vantage point overlooking seventeen acres of native grassland.

The Greenhouse project itself occurs across four related pillars of health, M1–M4.

M-1 is the self-identifier and reflects a legacy of self-empowerment and determination through architecture. M-2 cleanses soil and air via phytoremediation plants and EPA-lead soil remediation. M-3 is Meditation put into practice with Perennialism-based programing featuring a zendo and salah prayer space overlooking the grasslands. M-4, the foundation, is medicinal food supply. This is the farm to table identity of the greenhouse edified by holistic health derived from vegetation grown on site. The EPA classifies the region a superfund site due to soil-borne industrial toxins including lead. Free phytoremediation plants from Ferns to Poplars will be available to residents wishing to leach toxins from their lands as well as direct EPA contacts for lead soil extraction around their homes, making it safe for self-reliant food production.

Food crops will be free at local businesses such as the Fair Deal grocery store and restaurant. Omaha’s Union for Contemporary Art, the Omaha Economic Development Corporation, and the Malcolm X Foundation of Omaha have already pledged ongoing support including a part-time gardener.4Mgives tools to empower participants to build resilience into their communities through direct utilitarian actions. Offering North Omaha residents the health benefits of nature while working collaboratively to rehabilitate their immediate environments and develop self-sustaining practices leverages the historical legacy of the site as a seedbed of long term self-determination.

kNOw Space (Inverted Panopticon)

2018

2-way mirror film, plexi, metal, phytoremediation plants

‘kNOw Space’ is a portable zendo that provides participants with empowering tools to build resilience into self and community while providing private safe spaces within oppressive constructs to reflect or decompress in natural settings. The project will transform a deer hunting “blind” or panopticon (prison guard tower) similar to Thomas Jefferson’s estate as seen on a nickel, into a transportable meditation space with two-way mirrors that will be placed in public park areas as well as inner-city community gardens. The project seeks to reverse this haunting imagery of the guard tower into a positive inverted meditation space. This gives the visitor the power to “reflect upon one’s community in order to act upon it” (Paulo Freire) while blocking the gaze of possible oppressive elements with 2-way mirrored film that will camouflage the space into its surroundings. This project has been extensively tested by exhibiting prototypes at Midwest museums, colleges and neighborhood associations to test programming, safety and flaws in design to correct unforeseen circumstances. The pilot location will be on 2 acres of community gardened land in my home city of Des Moines Iowa in the Spring of 2019.

Des Moines Art Center alternative entrance for 'Body Snatchers'

(2016)

Richard Meier Trap House

2015

Richard Meier trap house (replication of Des Moines Art Center architecture) built with local community members. Community lecture/discussion on the state of white voyeurism in relation to race in museum spaces.