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Ask Me How: Germane Barnes on Establishing a Black Columnar Order from a Place of Joy

A view of Germane Barnes's exhibition

"Germane Barnes: Columnar Disorder," on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through January 27, 2025. Photo courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago.

If you want to reach Germane Barnes, ask a young person for help. “All my friends know this,” he laughed, repeating their advice: “You’re an adult asking for something, he’s going to say no. You want him to do this lecture? Get a college freshman or a high school student to ask, he’ll do it immediately.”

And, in fact, within four minutes of arriving in Boston for his Wheelwright Prize lecture, he got a text from a member of the GSD African American Student Union and agreed to meet with the group that night at the Shake Shack. In addition to his work as an associate professor at the University of Miami, director of the Community, Housing & Identity Lab (CHIL), and principal of Studio Barnes, most of his time is spent mentoring others. “I didn’t have that representation,” he said, “and so I understand the importance of it.”

Barnes wanted to be an architect all his life, making a model of the Guggenheim Museum in seventh grade. Today, you can view his solo exhibit, “Columnar Disorder,” at the Art Institute of Chicago. “A lot of this [work] started with the fact that, in architecture, you don’t see a lot of representation of people who look like me.” He earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture, but, he explains, “I never had a Black TA, Black professor, Black critic, Black juror.” In his survey classes, he was repeatedly shown the Colosseum—but never a building in Africa. “I know that the Mediterranean is vast,” he said, “and with its proximity to North Africa, there had to be some cross-pollination between the two. Why is that missing from what I’m learning?”

The Wheelwright Prize, awarded to Barnes in 2021, afforded him the long-awaited opportunity to pursue the answer to that question, and to develop his own columnar order that reflects Black identity and experience, now on display at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Germane Barnes speaks at a podium at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Germane Barnes speaks at the GSD on October 9, 2024. Photo: Zara Tzanev.

On October 9, he spoke at the GSD about his project, “Where This Flower Blooms: Anatomical Transformations in Classical Architecture,” in a talk that wove together his historic research and creative process (including references to Megatron and Solange), emphasizing the importance of tactility and how joy drives his work.

It all began years earlier: “At one point in my life,” Barnes said, “I was known as the ‘porch guy.’” Supported by an award from the Graham Foundation, he studied the porch “across the diaspora from Africa to Chicago,” and spent several years creating pieces that focus on that “interstitial space” between outside and inside that’s been so critical to African American identity and community. “The porch is an important space for observation of collective identity and entry point to the home, as well as issues of race, segregation, and spatial politics,” writes Barnes. In describing his 2018 Pop-Up Porch, a portable eight-by-twenty-foot wooden container that opens to provide couch space and soft lighting for socializing, he writes, “The front porch has served as a refuge from Jim Crow restrictions; a stage straddling the home and the street; and the structural backdrop for meaningful life moments.”

Barnes’s Wheelwright research in Italian archives first took shape when a colleague told him that the Italian portico predated the African porch. He decided to research this “contested history.” While he knew that African history was inevitably interwoven with Italian—for example, Septimius, ruler of Rome, was of North African descent—there was no information about Africa in the architectural materials he sought in the library at the American Academy in Rome. Instead, he had to turn to archeology and anthropology.

A drawing showing a plan and elevation of the Pantheon. A large black column appears in the center of the domed space.
Pantheon II, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Nina Johnson. Photography by Greg Carideo. © Germane Barnes.

Drawing from research he found in the archives and Paul Lachlan MacKendrick’s book North African Stones Speak, Barnes studied images of opus africanum, a North African system of stacking stones or bricks in a design both functional and beautiful, with examples in both Tunisia and Pompeii. He was also struck by opus sectile, a technique for creating collaged images made from any available materials. The pieces are not cut identically, as in a mosaic, but of all different sizes. The latter, he says, reflects so much of the African Diaspora and African American creativity; people have made beautiful and ingenious works with “whatever pieces they had.” Barnes began creating his own work in the opus sectile tradition. He pieced together butcher-block paper from a local Sicilian restaurant to create a world map that represents the actual size of each continent—rather than their typically distorted sizes centering western continents—to illustrate Africa’s significance in the global context and the influence of the Diaspora.

A diagram depicting five column orders from classical architecture adjacent to a box with an 'x' in it.
A diagram Barnes shared as part of his Wheelwright Prize lecture.

Through his research, Barnes found that Africa had columns before Greece; the Egyptians created the Papyrus order, which the Greeks took to create the Ionic, Corinthian, and Doric orders, Barnes explained. “We love to quote Vitruvius and talk about how the [Greek] columns are inspired by the female figure,” he said. Instead, he asked, “What if I make a column inspired by a Black figure, and then reimagine architecture through that lens?” He began to create a “truly Black columnar order,” returning to the question he proposed in his application for the prize. He developed a system of his own, which involved breaking every rule of the classical columnar orders. Barnes developed the three themes for his columns: identity, labor, and migration, and sought out materials that evoked the tactile qualities he appreciates. The result is a series of columns, masks, and drawings that reinsert the African tradition in Western architectural history.

A view of a black column by Germane Barnes standing in an exhibition space in the Venice Biennale. The column has a knotty, irregular surface.
Identity Column in the Venice Biennale 2023. Photo: Claudia Rossini.

The identity column, made of Spanish Marquina marble, was inspired by hair, with striations that look like undulating waves of braided, dreadlocked, and natural hair, and, from some perspectives, “a body emerging.” Barnes displayed the monumental work at the 2023 Venice Biennale alongside drawings that depict the identity column within the Pantheon. Small human figures at the column’s base symbolize the theorists who erased the existence of the Egyptian columns and African architecture and claimed it as their own invention with the Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian orders.

A view of Germane Barnes's exhibition "Columnar Disorder" at the Art Institute of Chicago showing black column made of woven hair.
Identity Column in “Columnar Disorder.” Photo courtesy Art Institute of Chicago.

Barnes says he wants his family to see themselves in his work, to recognize their memories and experiences, which are interwoven through all of his projects (this infusion of the personal is partly why he feels that his columns are not reproducible in the same way the Greek columnar orders are intended to be). He created another iteration of the identity column, this time with synthetic hair woven and braided by Chicago artist SHENEQUA, who trained with Nick Cave. She included “every hairstyle [Barnes] knew” from childhood, watching his four sisters get their hair done, from “Bantu knots to overhand and extensions.” The final product is a nine-by-four-foot tapestry that was then wrapped around a column.

When he designed the migration pillar with waves to symbolize the millions of people lost to the Middle Passage, and selected poplar for its construction—a nod to Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit”—Barnes knew his sisters would recognize the allusion. And when they saw the red clay labor column, he says, “they’d think about working twice as hard for half the credit.” Acutely aware of the ways that African and African American people’s labor has been erased, he always makes sure to credit the craftspeople who fabricate his works.

A view of Germane Barnes's exhibition "Columnar Disorder" at the Art Institute of Chicago showing drawings and sculptures.
“Columnar Disorder.” Photo courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago.
A view of Germane Barnes's exhibition "Columnar Disorder" at the Art Institute of Chicago showing a wood column.
Migration Column in “Columnar Disorder.” Photo courtesy Art Institute of Chicago.

His devotion to help break down barriers long upheld by systemic racism extends to how he thinks about gallery spaces for his installations, as well. Barnes took on the role of exhibition designer for his show at the Art Institute of Chicago. “I convinced them to let me do a stripe across the outside of the room,” he says. “It’s a way of identifying what’s going on in the space, and of saying that, at many white institutions, you have to reduce your Blackness. So, if you’re inside of [this space I designed], you get be unbridled—exactly who you are. When you’re in these public spheres, how much of yourself gets reduced, until you’re down to just a single strip of your identity?” The installation he created celebrates the unity of fragmented columns that split apart in the middle to allow viewers to see the perfectly aligned drawings on the wall in the background. Other columns rest at seat height. As someone for whom tactility and welcoming spaces are so important, Barnes invited participants to sit on and touch his work, as he’s done at other galleries in the past (each time, he was quickly corrected by curators).

A series of chairs he designed years earlier, “Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown,” were intended to be functional seats, as well. Those chairs—which turned out to be one of his biggest successes—evolved out of a series of mishaps in the early Covid days. When the project he’d planned to deliver for an event had to be reimagined for social distancing, Barnes created the chairs, thinking they’d be used for seating. Instead, the client displayed them as artworks. The chairs are made from materials typically found in a South Florida shotgun house—sheet metal, wood, and rope on the seats—in forms meant to mirror Black hair and hats, with chair backs that look like hair combs or the profile of a bejeweled crown. This became one of the projects he’d submit to the Wheelwright Prize jury, the members of which gathered at the GSD for a conversation with Barnes on October 10. Megan Panzano, GSD senior director of early design education and assistant professor of architecture, said she could see the germs of his columnar project in this series. The chairs—born out of what he thought was a failure—propelled him in a new direction in his work and helped him win the Wheelwright Prize.

A photo of a chair by Germane Barnes. Structure is yellow with green, white, and orange fabric and the back resembles an ornate comb.
Germane Barnes, “Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown,” completed 2020. Photo: Blair Reid.

 

He noted that the title of his Wheelwright research, “Where This Flower Blooms” comes from a poem by “our prophet, Tupac Shakur, who rivals Vitruvius.” Barnes often layers into his work all of his experiences and references—from pop culture to family stories to archival research. During his lecture, Barnes discussed Tupac’s poem about the beauty and resilience of a rose that rises up from a crack in the sidewalk, arguing that when we see a rose with broken petals rising up in the sidewalk, we don’t need to ask why it’s there but how it grew in a seemingly impossible place. “I’m aware of the weight that I carry on my shoulders because I’m a descendant of slavery and freedom fighters and Civil Rights activists who have done so much to get me to this point,” Barnes said. “That’s what’s allowed me to be so successful. It’s not just me doing the work. It’s my family doing the work. It’s me using all the ancestral knowledge I’ve gathered from my mom and my grandmother and turning that into spatial praxis. If you see me, you’re going to see a Black man. I’m going to wear that as a badge of honor.”

Germane Barnes and five other people sit behind low tables as part of a panel discussion.
Germane Barnes speaks with members of the 2021 Wheelwright Jury at the GSD on October 10, 2024. From right: David Brown, Megan Panzano, Barnes, David Hartt, Sumayya Vally, and Mark Lee. Photo: Zara Tzanev.

Barnes’ authenticity also allows him to reach the young people he’s devoted to mentoring. His impact on students at the GSD events was clear; they eagerly engaged him with questions about his career, design history, and process. Barnes gestured to the Black design colleagues with whom he shared the space, illustrating how much has changed since he was in school twenty years ago.

A view of Germane Barnes's exhibition "Columnar Disorder" at the Art Institute of Chicago showing a detail of a column made of woven hair.
Identity Column in “Columnar Disorder.” Photo courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago.

He offered advice to students on establishing their own authority and sense of community, and, when one student asked how he manages working from traumatic histories, Barnes replied, “When I work, it’s from a place of joy…. This isn’t about trauma. It’s about perseverance. This is about resilience. It’s about making something out of nothing, and sure, you might have scars and scratches. Your shirt might be a little bit tattered, or you might speak a little bit differently…. But, it’s still the rose. I hope you’re able to work from a position of joy, because I guarantee that the work will be so much better.”

Carrying that forward, his next projects include a collaboration in Dallas to “transform a space filled with hate into a space of hope, as restorative and design justice, with former GSD professor, Christian Stayner of Stayner Architects, and Jennifer Bonner of MALL, as well as the local Fort Worth office ch_studio,” and a solo project in Memphis, Tennessee. Both will allow him to extend the work he undertook for the Wheelwright Prize, bringing his work out of the gallery and into functional spaces that will invite users to experience—and, finally, touch—his designs.