“What does how we arrange interior space say about how we live? And what does that say about who we are?” asks Elizabeth Alexander in her book, The Black Interior. To enter a Black home is to enter a space where visual language is intentionally constructed, shaped by care and self-definition, allowing complexity and identity to take form outside the demands of public gaze and institutional framing, as noted in bell hooks’ 1995 essay “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life.”

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Rooted in these concepts and expanded through a design experience, Glory honors the aesthetics of everyday survival and the ways working class Black American families have built beauty, community, and meaning inside the walls that held them. Suspended between past and future, Glory transforms the gallery into an imagined Black American home interior, and a living technology of memory. In this space, the home becomes an archive of care and imagination, where images and objects speak in the language of cultural memory.

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Using the visual language of the 1970’s, an era that symbolizes cultural pride and transformation, nostalgia is activated as a portal exploring how material culture and spatial design tell a story of the ways Black identity can be created and reflected through one’s environment. Glory brings together artists whose practices engage with memory, materiality, family, and domestic space, working across photography, painting, assemblage, mixed media, textile, and sculpture. Collectively, the exhibition positions the interior space as a realm where the Black subconscious is materialized.