“You could feel something in the landscape,” Walter Hood said, describing the underdeveloped waterfront lot in Charleston, South Carolina, that he is helping transform into the new International African American Museum.
Hood, an Oakland landscape and public artist, is talking about the “spirits” of African slaves who arrived at the infamous Gadsden’s Wharf in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Hood, tasked with designing the museum’s outdoor space, wondered: “How do you emote those spirits in the landscape?”
Hood has gained international renown and a MacArthur “genius grant” for integrating local history, ecology and culture into his designs for parks, museum gardens and other urban spaces, even a traffic turn lane in Oakland. Sometimes that means reconciling with a difficult past: His design in Charleston features a tidal pool with waters that will recede at regular intervals to reveal a pattern of human figures, aligned as though imprisoned within the hold of a slave ship.
Some of Hood’s other recent projects, such as Oakland’s Lafayette Square Park, similarly spark conversations about social justice and the need to empower marginalized communities. Now the UC Berkeley professor is talking about other new projects, including a book, “Black Landscapes Matter,” a collection of essays written by him and other design professionals, and an art piece to be unveiled in February at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Q In “Black Landscapes Matter,” you talk about the idea that race structures landscapes. Can you explain?
A Around 2016, I called other urbanists, particularly African American landscape architects, to have a discussion at Berkeley. After the 2014 killing of Michael Brown by a White police officer, I was struck by how it was the same story over and over with these deaths: They were at a liquor store, or they were at a check cashing place, or there were walking in the middle of the street. There’s always a description of a kind of a marginal place, which I think gives you these images in your head that “This is a bad place, and so bad things happen in bad places.”
Q You also say that Black landscapes have been “erased” throughout history, including Seneca Village in New York City, a Black village that was eliminated to make room for Central Park in the 1850s. Any others?
A You can look at the Fillmore in San Francisco: Gone. When we talk about urban development in the 1950s and ’60s, we talk about how it was done for the public good. But in actuality, it lowered the density of Black people in urban areas and pushed them to high-density separate areas. In the Fillmore, pre-redevelopment, people lived in houses, and there were a lot of us.
Q Would this erasure also apply to Gadsden’s Wharf?
A I don’t think Gadsden’s Wharf was erased. It was forgotten. America’s history is violent, and a lot of that history is just forgotten. In Charleston, you can forget Gadsden’s Wharf but you can remember the Daughters of the Confederacy or plantations like Middleton Place.
Q You’re known for giving new life to underused spaces in cities. Was that the intention with your Oakland projects, such as transforming a turn lane under 580 into Splash Pad Park?
A I hate that interpretation, because it puts out the idea that I work in these “bad places.” These places aren’t “bad.” It’s just that people only see them in one way. I think for artists and designers, we have to reimagine places through the people who are there, as well as the cultural moment they are in.
Q Can you talk about your piece for the new Museum of Modern Art exhibit, “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America?”
A It’s called “Black Tower, Black Power.” I’m proposing a fictitious landscape in Oakland on San Pablo Avenue that’s littered with nonprofits that basically are supposed to take care of people in this kind of marginal existence. I’ve lived along this corridor, and my office has been there for almost 30 years, and it’s gotten worse. I also deal with the history of redlining that prevented any major development higher than six stories west of Telegraph Avenue. I create this fiction asking: What if nonprofits were armed with the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point program? I’m proposing high-rise towers for 10 nonprofits that illuminate how they might help people think of the future in a completely different way.
Where to see Walter Hood’s Bay Area designs
Oakland Museum of California: Hood Design Studio helped design the new landscaping for the museum’s gardens, which will showcase California’s five eco-regions when the museum reopens in the spring.
Lafayette Square Park, Oakland: This downtown Oakland park is designed to serve multiple users, including children, nearby office workers and the homeless people who have frequented the park since the Great Depression
Splash Pad Park, Oakland: An area under I-580 and near a busy traffic intersection was transformed into an oasis of trees and walkways that link the Grand Lake Theatre to Lake Merritt and provide a location for the city’s largest farmers market.
M.H. DeYoung Museum, San Francisco: The landscaping incorporates a sculpture garden, children’s garden and historic elements.
Bayview Opera House, San Francisco: Hood introduced a floating walkway of glass, steel and wood and other upgrades to make the building, the oldest wood structure in the city, more accessible and to allow some of its diverse programming to move outdoors.
