The MIT NOMAS Lecture: Curry J. Hackett

Why It Matters

Hackett’s interdisciplinary model embeds Black histories into design, guiding future policy, education, and cultural production toward more equitable built environments.

Key Takeaways

• Hackett uses art to reframe Black connections to Southern land.
• “Hold” installation explores enclosure, memory, and Black spatial narratives.
• Channels serve as interdisciplinary tools for storytelling and resistance.
• Land acknowledgments prompt critical dialogue about history and reparations.
• AI and soundscapes expand speculative futures for Black geographies.

Summary

The MIT NOMAS lecture featured transdisciplinary designer, visual artist, and NYU professor Curry J. Hackett, who interrogates Black relationships to land, media, and memory through a practice he calls Wayside.

Hackett frames land acknowledgments as a starting point for probing the “black sense of place” described by Katherine McKittrick, using the metaphor of “channels” to move across disciplines—architecture, sound, AI, and speculative fiction—to expose hidden narratives of enclosure, redlining, and the Middle Passage.

He illustrated these ideas with the “Hold” installation in Harvard’s Radcliffe Yard, a soundscape blending Charles River recordings and a personal baptism story, and cited Bell Hooks’s Appalachian Elegy and Cadia Hartman’s notion of chorus as an “enclosed dance” that informs the work’s choreography of space.

By marrying critical Black studies with design tools, Hackett proposes a generative form of enclosure that rewrites historical records and offers new visual‑media strategies for reparative architecture, signaling a shift toward more inclusive, place‑based curricula in academia and practice.

Original Description

Curry J. Hackett

"Other Channels: Imaging Black Life, Land, and Knowledge"

The MIT NOMAS Lecture

Part of the Spring 2026 MIT Architecture Lecture Series.

This talk asks how pedagogy, speculative fiction, and multimedia art can render what Katherine McKittrick calls a “Black sense of place.” Drawing on his transdisciplinary work and research, Curry J. Hackett reflects on how image-making, sound, archives, and AI might act as channels for narrating and re-presenting Black relationships to territory, history, and possibility.

Curry J. Hackett is a transdisciplinary designer, visual artist, and educator exploring Black relationships to land, media, and memory. A Farmville, Virginia native, his work works across scales and mediums to speculate on the aesthetics and ecologies of the American South.

Hackett’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Metropolis, among others. He has exhibited at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, the Architectural Association School of Architecture, and the “Making Home”—Smithsonian Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.Curry holds architecture degrees from Howard University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and currently serves as Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.