Session two of the inaugural Making Home Saturday Series features Chief of the Delaware Tribe of Indians Brad KillsCrow, Maria Nicanor, Director of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Kevin Young, Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The session explores the central role that community and organizational leaders play in reflecting a multiplicity of identities and concerns as a means of cultivating belonging and reshaping an understanding of home. The conversation is moderated by architect, designer, and scholar Mabel O. Wilson.

The Making Home Saturday Series is a quarterly program that pairs special guests with participants from Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial. The program’s two-part sessions include conversations on exhibition-related themes, including systems, belonging, memory, care, and building, as well as the contemporary concepts of home related to race, class, migration, climate, and technology.

SPEAKERS

Chief Brad KillsCrow is a member of the Lenape and Lakota Tribes. He was raised in Pawhuska, Oklahoma and attended Bacone College on a basketball scholarship. He joined the US Navy in 1996 and served in the Persian Gulf and then worked in law enforcement from 2002 until 2011 which included the Kaw Tribal Police and the Ponca City Police Departments. Chief KillsCrow is a graduate of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center – BIA Police Academy. For the past seven years, he has been employed by the Tonkawa Tribe of Oklahoma as Director of their Indian Community Development Block Grant (ICDBG) program. As the governing body of the Delaware Tribe, it is the duty of the Chief to provide leadership in maintaining tribal culture and values, providing services to tribal members, and ensuring a viable future through economic development.

Maria Nicanor is an architecture and design curator and historian. She is passionate about public access to culture and rethinking the traditional roles of museums by experimenting with new storytelling formats that connect cultural institutions with civic life. Before joining Cooper Hewitt as its director, Nicanor had been the executive director of Rice Design Alliance at the Rice University School of Architecture , director of the Norman Foster Foundation in Madrid, and a curator at the Design, Architecture, and Digital Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Before that, Nicanor had spent most of her career as a curator working on architecture projects and other initiatives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Kevin Young is the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. As the nation’s largest museum dedicated to telling the African American story, NMAAHC welcomes millions of visitors annually and engages a national audience through world-class online programming and digital access to its collections, including the recent launch of the Searchable Museum. Prior to joining the Smithsonian, Young previously served as the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. A professor for two decades, he began his career in museums and archives while serving as curator and Candler Professor at Emory University from 2005 to 2016. Young is the author of sixteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Stones, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, longlisted for the National Book Award; and Emile and The Field, named one of the best children’s books of 2022 by the New York Times. His nonfiction book Bunk was also longlisted for the National Book Award, a finalist for the National Book Critics Award for criticism, and named on many “best of” lists for 2017. Young is the editor of eleven other volumes, most recently the acclaimed anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Society of American Historians, and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.

Mabel O. Wilson (Moderator) is a professor of Architecture and chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. With her practice Studio&, she was a member of the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. Exhibitions of her work have been at the Venice Architecture Biennale, SFMoMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her books include Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums, and co-edited the volume Race and Modern Architecture. For MoMA, she was co-curator of Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021).