With this project, Structures that Transformed Education, I am creating a typological study of the history of education to highlight the variations and similarities in educational systems in the United States of America. I am photographing and building architectural sculptures of school buildings that played an important role in the history of racial segregation and racial desegregation in public education in America. I am working with school buildings that are associated with events that both led to and followed the U.S. Supreme Court decision in: Brown vs Board of Education that in 1954 overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal” in public education in the United States of America. The purpose of photographing and building architectural sculptures of these properties is to highlight these historic structures that best exemplify and illustrate the historical movement to provide for a racially nondiscriminatory education for all. While the African American segregation within the school systems anchors this narrative, this typological study integrates the school desegregation struggles of Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Chicano/Latino Americans. This study thus considers the school desegregation struggles of the communities of color together and separately as dictated by the historical record. Therefore, included in my photographs and architectural models are schools that were designed to provide segregated education for Caucasians, and schools that were designed to provide segregated education for African Americans, Indigenous People, and People of Color. School desegregation has always been an important part of the ongoing struggle for educational freedom in America. With this typological study, I am work with school buildings that have already been identified as significant places, and I am actively searching out properties that have been overlooked in the larger national narrative in the history of educational reform.
In the future when there is a vaccine for the coronavirus, I plan to travel to additional parts of the United States and make photographs of school properties that played an important role in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in: Brown vs Board of Education. In the meantime, I am satisfied in using my architectural background to build architectural models of school buildings that I cannot safely travel to. States that I have photographed in or have plans to travel to are; Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia, Texas, and Washington, D.C.