Making Home Saturday Series: Welcome Home (Session 2)
A CONVERSATION ON Cultivating belonging and reshaping an understanding of homE

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 will explore 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 will be 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.

Learn more about Session 1 of the Making Home Saturday Series.

Saturday Series Discount: Purchase a ticket for the first program and receive 50% off the second program. Please add both programs to your cart from each event listing or by selecting Back to Calendar from your cart. The discount will be automatically applied. Note that the ticket types and quantities must match for the discount to be valid.

SPEAKERS 

Portrait of Chief Brad KillsCrow who is wearing a blue and white patterned shirt in front of a black background.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.

Portrait of Maria Nicanor who has long brown hair and is wearing red glasses, a white jacket and black shirt.

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.

Portrait of Mabel O. Wilson who has short hair and is wearing a blue shirt.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).

Accessibility & What to Expect 

  • Format: The program will begin with a brief welcome, then the speakers will engage in a moderated conversation. It will end with an optional Q&A with the audience. 
  • About the space: This program will take place in Cooper Hewitt’s Lecture Room on the ground floor of the museum. It is fully wheelchair accessible. Theater-style seating is available. There is an accessible restroom on the same floor. Read more about  accessibility at Cooper Hewitt.
  • Accommodations: The program will have live CART captioning. If we can provide additional services to support your participation, email us at CHEducation@si.edu or let us know when you register. Please make your request as far in advance as possible—preferably at least ten days before the program date.
  • Recording: The program will be recorded and posted on Cooper Hewitt’s YouTube channel within two weeks. 

Support 

Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial is presented in collaboration with Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. This project received federal support from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum; the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the National Museum of the American Latino; the Asian Pacific American Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center; and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Generous support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Support is also provided by the Lily Auchincloss Foundation; Edward and Helen Hintz; re:arc institute; the Keith Haring Foundation; the Lemberg Foundation; Maharam; and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.