Threshold: Conversations on the Stoop is a series of public talks that take place on the front porch within the Intentionality, 1960: Whose Dreams? exhibition. Candace will be in conversation with a host of scholars, artists, archivists and neighbors around questions of race, residential space, displacement, memory, and belonging. The series builds on the Memory Teas that Candace hosted during her time as an Artist-in-Residence at APL, gathering first-person accounts from Black Chicagoans who remember the Dan Ryan’s construction and the neighborhoods transformed by it. Thresholds is a space where artistic practice, intellectual inquiry and lived experience intersect, challenging the divide between traditional forms of knowledge and creating space for nuanced, layered conversations on complex issues.
The October 16th conversation features Adrienne Brown, whose research in critical race studies and spatial theory, particularly her work on the perceptual history of mass homeownership, provides a conceptual framework for understanding how racialized perceptions have historically shaped residential policy. Her latest book, The Residential Is Racial (Stanford, 2024) charts how mass homeownership in the 20th century transformed not just where Americans lived but how they saw, felt, and described within their newly constellated neighborhoods.
Threshold is presented with support from the Office of the Provost Diversity and Inclusion team, in partnership with the Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression.
About Adrienne Brown
Adrienne Brown is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago and Interim Director of Arts + Public Life. Adrienne specializes in American and African American cultural production in the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the history of perception as shaped by the built environment. Her teaching and research interests include critical race studies, architecture and urban studies, American studies, Modernism, postmodernism, the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, popular culture, visual culture, and sound studies. Adrienne has also taught in the Chicago studies program at the University of Chicago.