Black Design History: 5 People, Places & Spaces To Know

Cheryl Durst Spotlights The Legacy Of Black Creatives

1. Harold Curtis Brown

Anyone who frequented Harlem nightclubs during the Harlem Renaissance likely enjoyed a space designed by Harold Curtis Brown. A Black, gay interior designer—a rarity for his time—Curtis shaped the interiors of then-hotspots like the Cotton Club, Tilly’s, and the Saratoga Club. Outside of Harlem, his other major projects included designing the interiors of Manhattan’s Hotel Navarro, which became an early Ritz-Carlton hotel. However, there’s much that remains unknown about Brown’s work and life—including what happened to him after 1938, when he seems to have disappeared. One architectural historian, Michael Henry Adams, believes that Brown might’ve chosen to pass as white and work under a different name to circumvent the rampant racial discrimination of the era.

2. Here: Where the Black Designers Are

Throughout her career, graphic designer, educator, and activist Cheryl D. Holmes-Miller constantly pondered one question: Where are the Black designers? In her memoir, Here: Where the Black Designers Are, she posits an answer. It’s a crisp, compellingly written look at her life in design, from her days as student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Pratt Institute, to her work with clients like NASA, BET, and Time, Inc. In telling her story, she also recounts her efforts, and those of others, to name Black designers, because naming is powerful—it makes the invisible, visible.

“We all have a purpose in life,” Holmes-Miller writes in her book’s introduction. Her purpose? “I am called to tell you the story of the very first Black graphic designer and to make sure that the Black designer of today never goes missing again. … I lift our story to the light so that we all can see us clearly.”

3. Azurest South, Amaza Lee Meredith’s Home

Amaza Lee Meredith was, simply put, amazing. She refused to be constrained by societal restrictions and prejudices. Born in Virginia in 1895, she became one of the country’s first Black female architects. A graduate of Virginia State University and Columbia University, Meredith chaired the art department at Virginia State and designed homes for family and friends. She designed her own home, Azurest South, in the International Style and openly lived there with her same-sex romantic partner, Dr. Edna Meade Colson. The house, which recently received grant funding for preservation efforts, is located on the Virginia State campus. Elsewhere on the East Coast, in Sag Harbor, New York, there’s more evidence of Meredith’s legacy: Azurest North, a community of summer cottages she and her sister created.

4. Norma Merrick Sklarek

The first Black woman to earn a degree in architecture from Columbia University? Norma Merrick Sklarek. The first to become a licensed architect in New York? Sklarek. In California? Again, Sklarek. (Those aren’t her only firsts; read the full story to find out more.) After college, Sklarek was rejected by 19 potential employers. That didn’t stop her. She went on to work at Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill in New York, then relocated out West for a position at Gruen Associates in Los Angeles. She ultimately rose to the role of director of architecture, and worked on projects including the Pacific Design Center, San Bernardino City Hall, and the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.

“I think it’s absolutely impossible to understand the level of prejudice and difficulty that she faced,” Kate Diamond, who at one point co-founded an architecture firm with Sklarek, told Columbia magazine. “I’m sure she felt every one of those little cuts. But Norma … had a backbone of stainless steel. And regardless of what was happening, she would work her way through to the answer she needed to get to.”

5. The Harlem StoryMap

Nothing beats a good map, especially an interactive and enlightening one. The Harlem StoryMap, created in 2021 by Thandi Nyambose, a then-student at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, is a digital guide to Black-designed spaces across Harlem. With archival materials, census maps, and news clippings, the StoryMap is a richly textured, deeply informative look at Black Harlem. The map’s landmarks include St. Philip’s Church, designed in the early 1900s by Vertner Woodson Tandy, New York’s first Black licensed architect, and the 1937 Harlem River Houses, the city’s first federally subsidized public housing development. Designed by Black architect John Louis Wilson, the Harlem River Houses were lauded by the New York Times as a “remarkably gentle oasis.”

Mavis Wiggins of TPG Architecture: 2022 Hall of Fame Inductee

Ceaselessly generous, effortlessly elegant, and indelibly humane, Mavis Wiggins thrives in the “and”: that beautiful landscape between nuance and subtlety, art and design, the said and the unsaid. Her colleagues at TPG Architecture, where she serves as managing executive and studio creative director, consider her something of a client whisperer for entities from DZ Bank to Irving Place Capital, who tend to emerge from their collaboration as design evangelists in their own right. “Mavis’s clients know every design decision is important to the success of the project,” TPG managing executive and studio creative director Suzette Subance Ferrier explains. “That is because she includes them in the process and educates them, so that they become an advocate for the design scheme.” Adds TPG managing associate and creative director Ricardo Nabholz, “Mavis understands clients better than they understand themselves. She shows them a vision of their future that fulfills their every aspiration and responds to needs that have yet to be articulated and offers them the opportunity to build that vision.”

Behind the “Mavis Mantra”

The “Mavis mantra” equates the design process to a revelatory and bottom line–affirming journey that requires seeing the arc between what is needed and what can be achieved. “I first determine how I can best help a client, really help them, and therefore improve their business acumen by guiding them through a remarkable journey together,” the workplace specialist says. “My mission is to help them see what is possible.” Her vision is truly multidimensional and peripheral, allowing her to look, see, and interpret from a multiplicity of stances. “What sets Mavis apart is her understanding of both space and occupants,” says Howard Albert, chief risk officer of insurance company Assured Guaranty, its New York workplace TPG completed in 2016. “She spent the time to understand exactly how we work and collaborate in the office, finding a way to be true to her aesthetic while really hearing what we were saying.”

“Seeing the possible” is Wiggins’s guiding principle, in life as in design. Her clear and coherent vision was honed by an early interest in photography and fine art. Growing up in Berkeley, California, in the 1960’s, Wiggins was deeply influenced and affected by the multicultural mix of that time and place—one that saw peace and turbulence, youthful uprising and middle-aged malaise, civil rights and social unrest. The era’s musical culture left a lasting impression, too: Wiggins still finds joy in the wall of sound that surrounded her then. “Sly Stone was a radio DJ at the time and played a crazy range of artists in the morning as we got dressed for school,” she recalls. “Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Janis Joplin, Smokey Robinson—my personal sound­track then is my playlist now.”

Wiggins took her love of the visual arts with her to Brooklyn, New York, where she moved to attend Pratt Institute. She claims the design profession “found” her. “At Pratt, I realized I could shape space and continue to enjoy the fruits of what fine art offers, and even apply some of those principals to interior architecture,” the discipline in which she received her BFA and connected with mentors like Joseph D’Urso and Stanley Felderman.

That desire to shape space in combination with her keen photographer’s eye for composition and framing—and her deep intuition to see place from both a designer’s and the end-users’ perspective—has resulted in a definable signature. During her three-decade career working at a roster of top-tier commercial-design firms (Gensler and HLW among them), Wiggins has become known for interiors that are elegant, serene, rational, and always tethered to place. “Mavis’s work is deeply contextual,” Nabholz says. “There are geographical, architectural, cultural, and organizational touchstones in each project. These come together to create spaces that are as timeless as they are specific to their place and purpose.” Ferrier concurs: “There is a level of clarity to her work that echoes great modernist design but with today’s level of sensitivity.”

Thomas Giannetti, partner and CFO of Lexington Partners, recalls teaming with Wiggins on the firm’s Manhattan headquarters, a project for which TPG was retained just before the pandemic. “Because of COVID, there were more challenges in the build-out than I ever thought possible,” he says. “Mavis’s determination to solve all the issues was tremendous given that we never knew what to expect with the pandemic,” from labor and supply chain issues to health and safety protocols, and even the dissatis­faction of not being able to cross the usual benchmarks and hurdles in the typical order. “Mavis was steadfast,” he continues. “She was determined to finish the project, without compromise, in a way that was seamless to our team.”

Wiggins is equally dogged when it comes to fostering inclusion. Though personally quiet, she speaks up loudly for others as an activist instrumental in increasing diversity in the A&D community, through her thought leadership and her support of fellow BIPOC practitioners. As this author’s personal aside, I stand proudly beside Wiggins as the only two Black women thus far inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame. When asked what our joint selection means in the context of time, she responded, “It means we all have more work to do. And we will.” There it is again: that word. There is beauty in the and—in the elegance and optimism that Mavis Wiggins embodies.

A Closer Look at Projects by Mavis Wiggins