for Mecca, 2025, polyester blend fabric, dye sublimation, air blowers, hardware, 30’x41’x24’
for Mecca is part of Floating Museum’s Floating Monuments series. A ghostly, inflatable architecture, this monument moves to sites across Chicago and beyond, serving as a dynamic platform for memory, conversation, exhibition, performance, and education. Its design honors the Mecca Flats apartment building—once a vibrant center of Black life in Chicago’s Bronzeville—and conjures traces of the neighborhood’s historic architecture. Though the Mecca Flats building was demolished in 1952 in the name of urban renewal, its legacy lives on through art, music, and memory.
Rather than replicating the original structure, for Mecca is an amalgam of photographs, writings, and sound recordings that collapse Bronzeville’s rich cultural history into the present. It invites reflection on the demolition of Mecca Flats and its replacement by S.R. Crown Hall—an act emblematic of broader patterns of displacement across Chicago and cities throughout the United States. By surfacing these histories, for Mecca fosters dialogue, reconciliation, and a call to deeper inquiry. It acknowledges how racism and capitalism have accelerated the destabilization and erasure of significant Black cultural spaces.
Drifting, collapsing, and reappearing, for Mecca challenges traditional monuments and prompts us to ask: How do we remember? Who are monuments built for? And how can resilience be cultivated through art, storytelling, and collective care in an ever-shifting city and world?
Click here to read the full Press Release.
for Mecca is a collaboration with Lead Archivist Skyla Hearn, and was made possible by generous support from the Mellon Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Additional project support was provided by the Poetry Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Indiana University, and the University of Illinois Chicago.
Lead Archivist /
Skyla S. Hearn is a flower blossomed from the South Side of Chicago by way of the Great Migration from Mississippi. Accepting her Ancestral Mandate*, Skyla is the founder of ActivelyArchiving, an archival consultancy, and co-founder of The Blackivists, a collective of six professional Black archivists who center the preservation of Black cultural heritage. As a liberated archivist, memory and cultural heritage worker she is most concerned with supporting unsung, lesser-known powerhouses in communities to further secure, document and share their own history specifically from a first person perspective. As a legacy keeper, she is a photographer, instructor, writer and co-edited the zine publication Our Girl Tuesday: An Unfurling for Dr. Margaret T.G. Burroughs alongside Tempestt Hazel and Sarah Ross with an introduction by Mariame Kaba, published by Sojourners for Justice Press. Skyla is currently a Special Collections Archivist processing the Johnson Publishing Company Archive at the Getty Research Institute and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
She earned an Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS), Rare Books and Special Collections (certificate) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, BA/S in Mass Communications and Media Arts (Black American Studies minor) from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, and a Civic Leadership Academy Certificate as a Fellow in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Contributions to the professional field and as a member of community and society at large include executive board appointments, advisory committees, mentorship, presentations, workshops, and providing resources to support community archives.
︎theblackivists.com
Research Assistants /
Tiffany M Johnson is a research-based artist, memory worker, researcher, and budding land steward passionate about community building through imaginative, underground, and cooperative practices. Her work often relies on archives as tools for intervention in programming, community preservation, and political education. She explores ways to push historical narratives and center understudied subjects and experiences.
Tiffany attended SOAS, University of London, for her Master's in Migration and Diasporas Studies. Her studies continue through her DIY Ph.D., a long-term art and hood scholarship project exploring alternative ways of being within spaces that combat oppressive structures. Through a radical afrodiasporic lens, she is interested in rebuilding human-to-land relations and centering understudied subjects and community care systems.
Tiffany was a Threewalls 2022-2024 fellow and co-stewarding the development of the survivor support mutual aid group, Project Nebula.
︎curatorsintl.org/
Believing in the capacity of art and social praxis to reveal truths about erasure through curatorial-community engagement, christian reeder's work fosters critical inquiry and historical empathy. Born on Creek and Cherokee land in Atlanta, Georgia; based on Potawatomi land in Chicago, chris is a researcher and curator dedicated to the intersections of art, culture, and social justice. They hold an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and a BA in Anthropology and French from Spelman College. Their practice is rooted in Black feminist anthropology and Black Diasporic Studies with a focus on the role of visual art in shaping social consciousness and collective memory.
︎curatorsintl.org/
This project is part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that aims to expand understandings of Chicago’s creative communities, past and present.
