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. The series brings artistic practice, intellectual inquiry, and lived experience into conversation, challenging distinctions between traditional forms of knowledge.
The October 16 conversation features Adrienne Brown and will examine how racial perceptions have historically shaped residential policy, 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: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership (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 a Professor in the Departments of English and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago and the Director of Arts + Public Life, a hub for artistic exploration, expression, and exchange that centers people of color and fosters neighborhood vibrancy on Chicago’s South Side. She is co-editor with Valerie Smith of the volume Race and Real Estate (2015) and the author of The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race, winner of the 2018 First Book Prize from the Modernist Studies Association, and The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership, published by Stanford University Press in 2024.