Description /
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.
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.
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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.
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.
