 Good evening and welcome to the Death Life Mentors lecture on the histories of modernity. Tonight, although we are here virtually, we also gather in Lenapehoking, the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lenape peoples. On behalf of GSAP, I invite you to join me in acknowledging the Lenape community, their traditional territory, elders, ancestors and future generations, and acknowledging that GSAP and Columbia University, like New York City and the United Nations as a nation, and the United States as a nation, was founded upon the exclusions and erasures of many Indigenous peoples. This acknowledgement serves to underscore GSAP's commitment to address the deep history of erasure of Indigenous knowledge in the professions of the built environment, generally and in the current tradition of architectural education specifically. With this, GSAP commits to confronting these institutional legacies as agents of colonialism and honoring Indigenous knowledge in its curricula. I would like to thank Elise Jaffee and Jeffrey Brown for endowing this important annual event in architectural history. This series is hosted in honor of Death Life Mentors life and scholarly work. The lecture's institution dates back to 2013, when GSAP launched the series in collaboration with Keller Easterling at the posthumous publication of Mentors book, Mies. In celebrating his commitment to rigorous academic work that challenges disciplinary norms, this series seeks to amplify the work of younger scholars whose research and writing supports a productive unsettling of architectural history. In keeping with these aims, it is my pleasure to introduce you to tonight's speaker, my colleague and friend, Dr. Jay Cephas. Jay is a historian and an architect. He is assistant professor in the history and theory of architecture at Princeton University. He received his master of architecture from the University of Detroit Mercy and his doctor of philosophy from Harvard University. Jay's critical spatial practices takes many forms. Among other things, he is the founding director of Studio Platt, a geospatial research and development practice that examines the past, present and the future of cities through critical data visualization. He has also founded the Black Architects Archive. This project has created a repository of underrepresented architects from across 200 years, often where knowledge of their contributions has persisted only in the memories of their descendants. It has assembled narratives of architectural practice and pedagogy from crowdsourced and community-based contributions. This project represents Jay's commitment to think theoretically and methodologically within archival absences. In doing so, the project challenges the institutional inequalities of the archive by not just assembling yet another archive, but rather developing a community around that assembly, one that both reveals the structural nature of archival absences and counters them. The project is one support from the Graham Foundation. Jay works at the intersection of labor and technology, and he is deeply attentive to the ways technology shapes bodily procedures of labor and its identity in relation to the built environment. I want to give you a sense of how Jay has built his argument around the making of laboring and racialized subjectivities of the Black working body in the United States. His recent article, Picturing Modernity, Race, Labor and Landscape in the American South, examines how landscape itself was the means of constructing the Black body in Georgia, as that which was fit only for outdoor work. Thus, thinking landscapes' history means thinking it as a site for experiment on display of and punishment for the racialized body. Jay's work on Fordist urbanism is profoundly relevant to understanding the architecture and urbanism of neoliberal and late capitalism. His recent essay, The Landscapes of Logistics, looks at the landscapes inhabited by people who surround and support Amazon's Tijuana Fulfillment Center. This logic of logistics urbanism, the digitized and inventory warehouse versus the dense and assembled settlement that supports it, begs the question as to how we can historicize North American factory urbanism. From Fordist worker management to understand these new logistics landscapes of which Amazon warehouses are only one iteration in his work. Jay formulated this methodology of being attentive to the laboring body as a means to investigate a spatial history in his work in studying Fordism in Detroit. I very much look forward to Jay's exciting forthcoming book, Fordism and the City. I remember him at one point describing this work as a prehistory of post-Fordism, which is to say that the question that animated the research was given what we know now about Detroit, how might we think new methodological ways to investigate Fordism in the interwar period. One of the key interventions that Jay makes about Fordism is that it constituted its own specific form of urbanism. That is, Fordist urbanism is not determinist with Detroit. In fact, Detroit can sometimes be the foil for or and the substance against which Fordism as a spatial, architectural bodily and urban phenomenon was conceived of and executed by its practitioners. The way that I'm discussing Jay's work has been crucial to my own thinking on the body and labor and the city in architectural history. So with that, it is my absolute pleasure to welcome Dr. Jay Cephas to give this year's Dead Left Maintenance lecture on the histories of modernity with his talk incorporating practice practices. Welcome Jay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for that very generous introduction. Thank you to Mary, Felicity, Mabel, and Mark for inviting me to give this talk for which I'm so honored to do. And thank you to everyone else involved who was involved in organizing this event. Your labor is very much appreciated. I'm pleased to be here to discuss some of my work tonight. The first, I will begin by situating myself. I'm speaking to you this evening from within the unceded territory of the Lonnie Lenape people, a region called Lenapeoke. I'm speaking to you from my home, which is on the edge of the university campus and is within a town, a state, and a nation that were all founded upon measures of exclusion, erasure, and violence, and similar measures of exclusion, erasure, and violence forced my own ancestors to the Caribbean plate long ago, and have in turn made my presence here possible. And yet still measure, still more measures of exclusion, erasure, and violence continue to shape the communities within these unceded territories today. Acknowledging the land and territories from which I speak to you today, serves to bring to the forefront the legacies of dispossession that are foundational to the histories of both the land and the people from the Americas. The founding in the United States depended on the dispossession of land from the indigenous people of this continent, and the growth of the United States depended on the dispossession of labor from the bodies of enslaved Africans. The United States and the Americas, especially its spatial histories cannot be rightfully articulated without grappling with histories of land and histories of labor. My acknowledgement of unceded land and territories does not serve merely as an introduction to this talk, but rather structures the way I think about and engage with histories in the built environment. In many acts of dispossession that have forged contemporary cultures in the Americas. I'm interested in how the dispossession of ways of making and doing that is the dispossession of knowledge, and the dispossession of labor have helped shape spatial practices. I'm interested in the narratives told about these dispositions, the ways in which the histories of labor extraction from working people have been presented and represented, and the role of the built environment, the construction of these social histories. And especially to the age of industrialization, and how the spatializing and how the spatial practices introduced by technical production serve to foreground a union between ethics and aesthetics deployed to forge new social identities for urban residents. An analysis is a messy juncture of bodies, architectures and technologies, where the body the working body in particular serves as a suture between the construction of ideology on the one hand, and the control of social identity on the other. This framing of historical spatial analysis in relationship to bodies as mechanisms for transmitting ideology is rooted in what I call incorporating practices. Incorporating practices describe how social ideals and social identities are inculcated through the spatial practices of the body. And these bodily practices are then further reified in both the production and practice of architectural and urban space. These practices serve here as a conduit for theorizing relationships between space, identity and aesthetics, and also as a methodological tool for analyzing the history of spatial practices, specifically by understanding architectural and urban space as an aggregation and extension of bodily habits and dispositions. So to work, I'm interested in how an aesthetic sensibility, associating working class bodies, modern buildings and efficient machines, issued from for this industrial processes in Detroit during the 1920s and 30s. Here I seek to reveal a certain choreography of authority, emanating from representations of what will come to be presented as a kind of communal history of industrial production. The communal histories are narratives of the past that are constructed by discourses, in which, as sociologist Paul Connaughton put it, quote, everyone and everyone portrays in which everyone is portrayed, and in which the active portrayal never stops, and quote. I argue that the museum as a cultural institution played a critical role in such infinite portrayals as it participated in the construction and dissemination of the image of the industrial worker, primarily by positioning the consumption of aesthetic practices as an ethical issue, and by offering art as a vehicle through which to frame the history of the uncertain modern present. One question, the Detroit Museum of Art, had its beginnings in 1881, when James East Scripps newspaper magnet and owner of the Detroit News returned from a European tour with extensive journals documenting the arts and culture that he encountered in Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands. Scripps published parts of his travelogue in the Detroit News and later issued his journals as a separate volume called Five Months Abroad. In 1883, the Detroit News organized an art exhibit based on Scripps journals, using excerpts from them to contextualize a range of artworks displayed, which included works by local artists as well as drawings by school children. The exhibit was so popular that a group of Scripps's fellow industrialists were inspired to fund a new museum for the city. In 1885, the first 1885, the museum opened to the public, originally housed in a Richardsonian Romanesque building designed by Canadian architect James Valfour, and located at East Jefferson Avenue and Hastings Street in Detroit. Scripps donated the museum's first art collection. The public mission of the fledgling museum was established in 1930, when it joined the Detroit Library Commission, the Detroit School of Design, the Detroit orchestral association, and the Michigan chapter of the American Institute of Architects in positioning the city of Detroit for a new center for arts and letters. The group submitted to the mayor and common council, outlining an urban planning initiative that would create a cultural district along Woodward Avenue, Detroit's main thoroughfare about two miles north of downtown. The committee had already raised over $216,000 to purchase land for the project between Farnsworth and Kirby Avenues, and I and Drew Carnegie had donated another $375,000 towards the construction of a new library building to be designed by architect Cas Gilbert. The report requested from the city a donation of $1 million for a new art museum building, while also pointing to a public demand for new buildings for the Detroit School of Design, the Detroit orchestral association. Finding both the report and the architectural plan satisfactory, the mayor and the common council accepted the proposal for the new center of arts and letters. Following that acceptance in 1919, the Detroit Museum of Arts seated ownership of its entire collection to the city of Detroit in exchange for annual funding, as well as monetary support for designing and constructing the new museum building. In agreeing to give up its private status and its art collection in order to receive funding for the new building, the museum changed its name to the Detroit Institute of Arts for the DIA. It was a new department within the city government, overseen by the newly formed Arts Commission, whose four members were appointed by the mayor. Now the members of the first of this first Arts Commission reflected key actors in a convergence of aesthetic practices and industrial production that would define the cultural institutions of Detroit during this period. Ralph H. Booth served as president of the commission. He had previously been vice president of the Associated Press and an editor at the Chicago Journal. The elder brother George Booth found in Booth newspapers, the parent company of the Detroit News, but most notably the elder booth would found the Cranbrook Educational Center, an artist community and school that would realize much of the Bauhaus aspiration to industrialized design, producing notable graduates such as Florence Knoll and Charles and Ray Eames. With Ralph Booth, the commission included the industrial architect, Barbara Kahn, German art historian Wilhelm Valentiner, who would serve as the new director of the DIA, and also Edsel Ford, then president of Ford Motor Company, and who was also an avid art collector that would be largely responsible for bringing modern art to Detroit. As director of the DIA, Valentiner sought to maintain the museum's focus on amassing a historical collection that included ancient art, European art and Asian art, while continuing to build its store of contemporary art, especially work from North America. Even prior to its reorganization as a public institution. The museum had already been among the first in the country to display a comprehensive collection of decorative arts in tandem with its fine arts collection at a time when showcasing objects of use and craft items, along with, or within the proper fine arts museum would have been unusual, if not discouraged. With the assistance on showing both fine arts and decorative arts that drove the plan of metric organization of the new museum building, designed by Philadelphia architect Paul Philippe Crane. The principle organizing structure the museum depended on what one historian referred to as a quote, teleological historicism. The teleological historicism grounded Valentino's curatorial strategy, two wings like either side of a main hall with one wing housing American art and the other wing housing European art. The first room of each wing adjacent to the entrance hall was a large gallery for the contemporary and decorative arts of the US and Europe, respectively. The main wing took visitors through a series of small galleries of modern American art that resolved in a series of colonial period rooms. The European rooms, similarly took visitors through a historical trajectory. While the progression was fixed, it wasn't rigid, meaning that visitors could turn off one track and begin another. For example, the European gallery allowed a visitor to begin with either Gothic or early Christian, and from there choose to move forward to the Renaissance Baroque, then to 18th century French and English rooms, or to move backwards through the Roman Greek and Egyptian periods. On the hall lay another gallery housing the art of Asia and antiquity. Each gallery set was arranged a linearly was arranged linearly around the central court with smaller rooms within the galleries, organized around a distinct historical period. Visitors can enter the gallery from one of two ends, and from there progressed in a circular route through the rooms to effectively move either forward or back in history. The antique wing similarly arranged the works in historical linearity, beginning with either Rome from the European end, or Aztec and Peruvian art from the American end. The visitor progressed through the arts of Egypt, of Greece, Egypt, India, Persia, Asia Minor and Turkey on the one side, and Tibet, China, Korea and Japan on the other. The layout organized art as a progression of cultures with Europe and the United States occupying the primary and largest gallons, consistent of both contemporary and historical work, while the arts of Asia, Egypt and South America were located in a perennial past, along with the antique works of Roman Greece. Over one the visitor, each of these quote unquote, foreign galleries offered a respite via an interior courtyard, the European galleries centered around an outdoor medieval court, while the antique galleries centered around an indoor Italian Baroque garden. The diversity of the collection, including both applied art, as well as fine art depended on the use of period rooms to showcase the works. The type of model room that originally rose in mid 19th century England became especially popular for American historic preservation sites, as a means of this exhibiting a sort of vanishing way of life. The first recorded period rooms in the United States were installed by George Francis Dow at the Essex Museum and sale of Massachusetts in 1907. Dow's period rooms were composed of a mix of originals, reproductions and approximations, demonstrating that historic authenticity was less important there than conveying the spirit of the times and the lives lived in the past. Valentina himself was largely responsible for the introduction of period rooms to American museums. And this came from when he had been appointed curator of the new Department of Decorative Arts 1907 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But unlike the mix of copies and originals that characterize the period rooms of American museum villages and historic preservation sites, Valentina's period rooms prioritized authenticity, insisting on a consistency across the objects on display, as well as a union between the art of artifacts and the architectural settings in which they were situated. The rooms then offered an immersive atmosphere in which visitors were encouraged to imagine themselves living in these settings. The absence of historical bodies, coupled with the presence of embodied artifacts, such as chairs, handrails and other furniture, encouraged this imagination in the period room. The period room relied on recreating conditions beyond the artwork on display. It provoked associations of craft work with fine art by encouraging the interpretation of ordinary artifacts of material culture as aesthetic objects. Valentina's use of the period room as a curatorial strategy to historicize the works of art in the new DIA building was supported by Cray's belief in historic architecture as a civic duty. Cray insisted that the architecture of the museum should do nothing other than support the historical conditions of the works of art, which by extension meant fulfilling a duty of educating the museum visitor on the spatiality of the period in question. In practice, the typical museum visitor would be no more familiar with, say, the Flemish window casings of the Low Countries period room than they would be with the paintings of the Dutch masters hanging on the walls. Yet the authentic presentation of both remains key to the delicate ideological position that the museum needed to manage in this case. More than simply a presentation of artworks, the artifacts on display in the DIA and the architecture of their period rooms work together to convey certain attitudes and ideals about the present through their representation of the past. And with the growing population of immigrants who by 1930 comprised nearly 70% of the city's population. The four members of the Arts Commission were in agreement that a primary function of the museum in the city of Detroit was to extend the more didactic processes of Americanization that took place in the city's factories. However, the financial downturn brought on by the Great Depression, meant that by 1930 the DIA struggle to raise the funds necessary for supporting the institution, and therefore wasn't bringing very many visitors into the museum itself. As a public institution, the museum could not require payment for entry, but rather needed to incentivize people to buy subscriptions just for support. So Ford, who's part of the Arts Commission engaged in a personal fundraising campaign, initially seeking donations from wealthy residents, though they ultimately refused to give because they figured Ford himself had more than enough money than any had more, more money than any of them, certainly enough to run the institution on its own, unable to garner any commitment to patronage forward ended up paying the salaries of the DIA staff himself. Without personally funding a museum in perpetuity for turn to Fred L block to develop a plan for supporting the DIA. Black was a journalist who Ford had initially met when his father Henry Ford hired black in 1916 to start a newspaper for the Ford Motor Company. By the late 1920s black and become a personal advisor to Henry Ford, especially in matters related to public publicity. Ford asked black to convince the Detroit City Council to extend greater financial support to the DIA. But after getting nowhere with the city council black asked the president of the museum's founder society to raise money on a membership plan for the museum. In his discussions with the founder society, black reported back to Ford, but the problem was that the museum's programs are too focused on discussing art with people who already knew something about art. And that the general public felt left out, and thus was uninterested in supporting a museum that did not cater to their interests. In this problem, black proposed a fundraising plan that would orient the museum entirely towards common Detroiters, declaring that the commission needed quote, a new organization with a popular type of membership to get a lot of people such as clerks and factory workers in the museum as members. This is what the museum needs and quote black proposed the people's museum association. This association offered memberships for just $1, which was much lower than the lowest membership level that already existed for the museum which was for $10. Black knew that these $1 memberships would cost the museum more than $1 per year but he stressed that the important thing was getting the new museum members in the door. In his first hand from Ford's economies of scale from working directly with Henry Ford, black argued that once a critical mass of members was achieved, then the museum board can go to City Hall, show that the museum had widespread support from ordinary Detroiters including factory workers, and thus garner additional city funding. In the new publicity campaign, Etzel Ford offered to pay for wall covering in one large room at the DIA in the hopes that the new artwork would bring members to the museum and thus raise enough money to release Ford from his financial obligation to the institution. Later that year after having returned from a trip to California, Valentino suggested inviting the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera to create a series of frescoes with the DIA. Valentino had met Rivera during his trip as Rivera had been working on frescoes for the San Francisco Stock Exchange building. The other Arts Commission members agreed and Ford offered to pay the artist fees as well as the cost from materials. Rivera arrived in Detroit in April 1932, and over the next three months he toured the city, including spending extensive time at the Ford Motor Company River Rouge plant with no direction from the Arts Commission other than to quote unquote beautify the museum, and quote, possibly find something out of the history of Detroit and quote, Rivera began painting the interior garden court in July of that year. Over the next eight months that Roberto was painting the courtyard remained open to the public, allowing visitors to observe the development of the frescoes have witnessed the artists at work. The greatest frescoes which he titled portrait of Detroit, but which came to be known as Detroit industry covered multiple panels lining the interior garden court. The frescoes childhood the cycle of industrial production through a series of rich visual narratives, noting the various races making up the American workforce, the place of the medical pharmaceutical and chemical industries and production, and the contrast of the agricultural types. The north and south walls of the courtyard depicted the main themes of Detroit's industry, the central panel of the south wall displayed the assembly and attachment to the exterior body of the automobile to the chassis. And the central panel of the north wall described the production and assembly of the 1932 Ford v8 engine. Once it had been completed, George Perot, who had been managing the publicity for the People's Museum Association began a press campaign aimed at stirring up interest in the frescoes. Perot conjured a controversy, claiming that a priest had criticized the mural as a blasphemous representation of the holy family. The first question was on the upper right hand side of the north wall, and it depicted the vaccination of a child of as part of a larger narrative about the role of a pharmaceutical industries and modern society. The child nude save a small cloth wrapped around the waist for modesty stood on a small pedestal was gently held by a nurse who watched on as a physician injected the child with the vaccine. From a distance, however, which is how most people would have seen the panel, the group appeared to be a mother with a child with the nurses white cap appearing to be a halo around the mother's head. And the child's blonde hair appearing to be a halo around the childhood, suggesting not a nurse and a child for rather Mary and Jesus. Once the controversy had been invented, Perot been sought out religious leaders who would validate a scandal. The grand opportunity, Perot declared to the Arts Commission, quote, I'm going to get a committee of preachers to come in here and invite some to press, whatever they say will make news and quote. The Reverend Ralph Higgins a local Episcopalian minister served that role by lambasting the fresco, claiming that it did not revere the wonders of modern medicine, but rather that the panel only showed quote, a fat ugly child flanked by a nurse and a physician who are engaging in transmitting the infant. And that together with animals in the foreground, and the golden halo around the child's head combined to suggest strikingly the holy family, and quote. Others joined the fray to claim that the depiction suggested that science with triumph over religion. The controversy made headlines around the world, including the front page of the New York Times, I was further aided by widespread knowledge that Rivera was a known communist sympathizer. So further census sensationalize the story by holding public meetings on the matter in the museum's lecture hall. Black presided over these meetings where he permitted anyone to talk provided that the topic stayed on the murals, and each person then also talked no longer than two minutes. Soon the hall was filled to capacity for each meeting, including journalists who interviewed attendees, these public meetings continued on for several weeks. While Rivera completed the frescoes in March 1933 78,000 people had already visited the museum to see them. While the mural controversy brought the visitors in, many took the opportunity to visit the rest of the museum as well. According to black, some visitors had never even been to a museum before. This meant that black and pro's publicity campaign was working. Both added new members to the museum roster, while also exposing working Detroiters to art. As a result, the museum attained $5,000 in membership fees. Clyde boroughs, who was then secretary of the Arts Commission, having only replaced Ralph Booth, and girls had also previously been the director of the DIA before Valentina's arrival. The girls took the list of new members to the city council and convinced them to partially from the museum, eventually relieving Edsel Ford of his financial burden entirely. So there was a widespread presumption that Rivera's rendering of Detroit's industry conflicted with the ideals of Detroit's industrial production. Specifically, that Rivera's communist leanings were inherently conflicted for this industrial capitalism, and thus Rivera's murals must have been some kind of revolutionary rebuke of the men who commissioned his work, if not of the entire system that they supported. Yet, Edsel Ford offered no public commentary on the frescoes, except to say that he found them aesthetically beautiful, and that they reflected Rivera's interpretation of Detroit alone. However, Edsel and the other members of the Arts Commission, that is, Albert Kahn, Wilhelm Valentina and Clyde boroughs celebrated the attention that murals brought to both the museum and to the city. In their eyes, Rivera's frescoes single handedly brought the museum out of a financial crisis by allowing them to sign up more subscribers and thus welcome more visitors than any other exhibit in the institution's history. This factored controversy surrounding Detroit industry also served to expose a broad public in Detroit and beyond to a particular aesthetic writing of industrial history. One that centered bodies in industrial production, and in so doing position the industrial worker as the primary subject of industrial history, and the frescoes as reflecting and a subjective experience of industrial work. All together, the purpose of the museum as a series of period rooms was to craft an argument about Detroit's presence and possibly its future by constructing a particular narrative about the past. Now, this past was not necessarily Detroit's past per se, rather, it was the past of northern Western Europe, Greece and Rome, the indigenous Americas, China and Japan. Most importantly, it was an argument about the relationship between these places and their histories, the role they played in the form of history of the United States, and how the working people that the museum sought to inculcate through its aesthetic rendering of history might see themselves within the culmination of those histories in the present moment. Ultimately, what was displayed as a sequence of various cultures throughout history in the museum's period rooms were collapsed into the singularity of American culture, originally figured just in the American galleries when the museum was first designed. And then the transformation of the interior garden court relief quote unquote relief from the antique and foreign arts into the court of industrial frescoes provided a new focus point for the culmination of that American narrative. When the original interior garden was intended to provide rust from the antique and quote or an arts reverberate transformation positioned the new garden court as a period room itself. However, the garden court is a period room presented a conundrum for the museum. In a letter to Roberto dated April 24, 1931, Valentino expressed this concern and writing, stating that quote, as you will see from the enclosed photos, the architecture of the into indoor garden is rather the Italian Baroque style. Whether it would form a good surrounding for your frustrations, it would naturally be better if it would be modern architecture, unquote, recognizing Roberto's paintings as works of modern art. Valentino and the other members of the Arts Commission understood that such work should be housed within the modern room in order to be consistent with the period room arrangement to the museum. This option would have been to redesign the garden court. However, there was no money for redesign as the Commission was already relying on Ford's personal fortune in order to pay Roberto. Even if a redesign of the room was possible, create himself was concerned that modern architecture being so understated would not sufficiently be read as a style for a period room. And thus leaving the visitor to read the modern architecture as a, thus leaving the visitor to read the modern architecture of a modern period room as simply having no style, and thus not actually being a period room for create this would leave the artifacts within the room without historical context, and thus no framework through which they would be read. In the modernist room, Craig lamented how Roberto's painting technique, whereby he painted right to the edge of the wall, and without a frame, accentuated the modern aesthetic of the fresco, which in turn muddled any distinction between the architectural wall and the artistic surface of the mural. The design of the ceiling detail for the 16th century Italian period room demonstrated craze own approach in distinction to Roberto's in rendering the room to its appropriate a period style, Craig designed the architectural wall is not just a structural framework on which the painting would hang, but as the aesthetic frame through which the painting would be presented and interpreted. The wall as frame was crucial to not just situating the painting, but for distinguishing between the art surface and the architectural surface. In a way, it was imperative that the two remain separate and distinct for the artwork required by Craig standard, an interpretive framework through which it must be read and architecture served as that framework. The tingling of architectural wall and artistic surface so disturbed Craig that he wrote multiple letters to the Arts Commission and protest. Whereas craze discreet treatment of the wall, the Italian period room allowed architecture to frame the painting, Roberto's continuous treatment of the wall as painting in the garden court position the wall as less a frame and more as a window to some other beyond. The wall as window suggested that the period in question in the new garden court period room was not a distant past, but rather was now that is the present moment of 1933 and the industrial reality of Detroit at that time. Offering a virtual window through the walls of the DIA and into the assembly building of the Ford River Rouge plant, the frescoes revealed themselves with not a historical rendering of Detroit, but as a portrait of Detroit, as Rivera actually named them. And that this was meant to reflect the city's present moment. But unlike the other period rooms of the museum, the garden court displayed a different relationship to bodies and embodiment. Whereas the architectures and artifacts of the museum's other period groups presented bodies as an absent presence in the form of an empty chair or worn handrail, Roberto's garden court rendered bodies present at work and fully engage. At the center of making a motor, the name of the main panel occupying the North wall, Roberto depicted a group of workers, wheeling a cart with an engine, they're active and engage bodies wrestling the cart into place. The men struggled with the motor, and they move rhythmically in unison, as if their bodies were tuned to a larger choreography that align them with the machine surrounding them. The workers' bodies extended from and into the machines they manipulated, suggesting that Rivera's representation of the factory floor in making a motor valorized the men and machines central to the production process by articulating their bodies as one, working in a single harmonious action and serving as a literal linchpin holding the assembly line together. Roberto's depiction of the factory floor in Detroit industry championed the working body, in part by materializing and valorizing the abstraction of labor. His ideal of the worker as active and engaged in the rhythmic processes of factory labor reconciled the new production technologies of Fordism with the modernist vision of humanism. In Detroit industry, as has been widely noted, we never see a completed vehicle, no do we ever comprehend the factory as an architecture for any of its production processes as a whole. Rather, Roberto attempted a subjective rendering of factory work, one imbued with the vitality as if to emphasize the presence, pure and simple, of the working body as alive. The dynamic and active bodies depicted in Detroit industry contrasted with the idle and unmoving bodies exemplified in Charles Schiehler's well-known photographs of the Ford River Reach plant. Schiehler had been hired by Henry Ford in 1927 to photograph the newly completed factory, and he often strategically framed the subjects of his photographs to either eliminate workers entirely, or to portray workers as incidental to the labor and machines. In a way, Schiehler's photographs scripted the human presence within the factory as passive, while the machines took place as the main aesthetic subjects. Such docile bodies by nature could only be acted upon in contrast to the active bodies in Rivera's rendering that occupied that little center of activity on the factory floor. In this way, Rivera's depiction pushed back against notions of workers' bodies as sites of an instrumental pragmatism instituted by industrialists and the scientific management protocols that fixated on bodies and worked upon them much the way a mechanic would work upon a machine. Detroit industry instead centered these bodies in production, making them larger than life, certainly much larger in relations to the machines than they actually were, and unified them in their role on the production line and activated them in relation to the passive bodies of the factory overseers. Yet Detroit industry was not entirely a counter study to the scientific management way of positioning the body in relation to labor, but rather it demonstrated a form of acquiescence to the new system of production, along with exposing the contradictory body labor relations obscured by Ford's production. The Detroit industry also reflected the role art and aesthetics played in transcribing industrial history for public audiences, not just as a means of writing workers into that history, but also as a means of soliciting that participation in the naturalization of industrial culture. There's a way in which Detroit industry sanitizes labor, while its placement in the Baroque courtyard suggests a window into the world of factory work. So it is referred to glimpse into a highly highly idealized space of labor. In Detroit industry, there is no racial segregation on the assembly line. There are no workplace injuries. There are no long ruling hours. There are no women period. And presumably, there's no need for unions. If the Baroque courtyard does not really tell the story of labor, it restricts and contains labor within its walls. It offers a window, not to the factory floors of Detroit, but to an idealized space of labor that was in fact far from reality. In the weeks and months before Rivera's arrival to Detroit, the city was in an increasing state of tension. The crash of 1929 had sent the city into a tailspin, as manufacturers had laid off tens of thousands of workers. Ford Motor Company laid off 5,000 workers alone. But as one of the largest employers in the country, it had still retained over 30,000 workers, even at the height of the depression. Despite offering higher wages than most manufacturers, Ford became the target of an intense union organizing campaign due to its long working hours, exceedingly dangerous work conditions, and overall precarities of labor. Throughout the city, the fledgling United Auto Workers Union began organizing small automobile shops with the aim of eventually targeting the larger factories of General Motors and Ford. These organizing campaigns took place in the streets as much as they did in the factories. In 1932, just four weeks before Rivera's arrival, thousands of laid off Ford workers marched from downtown Detroit to the Ford River Rouge complex in Dearborn, demanding concessions for lost jobs and wages. The workers were met at the Dearborn City Line by Dearborn police who attacked them with the taunts. When the workers progressed to the Rouge factory gates, armed Ford security agents fired their weapons directly into the crowd. Four workers were killed and a fifth died later from his wounds. Later that week, tens of thousands of Detroiters marched down Woodward Avenue for the funerals of the slain men. A massacre, as the event came to be known, mobilized workers across the region as union organizing picked up immensely in response to the egregious attack. That this turmoil was underway in the weeks before Rivera's tenure at the DIA and continued during this day, puts the museum's publicity campaign and the manufacturer controversy about the vaccination panel in a different light, making it likely that the publicity campaign was not just about getting more visitors into the museum, but also about distracting attention away from the growing labor movement that threatened Edsel Ford's control over his company. The Detroit industry murals, the historical period rooms, the people's museums association. Each of these functioned as processes of incorporation as processes of creating a singular unified identity from the multitude of particulars. Each function as a mode to inculcate the immigrant Detroit are into the social and spatial practices of the American by way of aesthetic consumption with the murals, serving a key role in conveying a subjective outlook with which the museum goer would identify. Both the museum as a whole, and the murals within comprise an aesthetic project that materialized industrial technology through the body of the industrial worker with the Detroit industry murals operating as a repository of industrialized aesthetic practices. However, these incorporating practices consolidating the many into the singular did not over determine the spatial practices of workers, rather the spaces of workers, the actual court of industry as it were, took various forms from the billboards and bulletin boards advertising workplace organizing to the streets of the city, witnessing marches and protests to the picket lines demarcating and asserting workplace rights. Architecture served here, not to contain or restrict the narrative of industrial history, but as the grounds issuing the history of the future. The representations of workers by workers in this context, featured not the space of industrial production, but the work of labor organizing Walter specs 1937 untitled mural, captured in tandem, the tensions, following the Ford massacre, and the Union promise to organize the largest factory at River Rouge, painted not in a museum, but in the hall of UAW local 174 on the West side of Detroit, the mural reflected an ongoing and unfolding narrative. One that positioned the factory grounds as a site of protest, and that recognize the critical role of women and building the labor movement. The bodies of workers here are not active and engaged in the work of the production line. That is, they are not defined by their productive capacity, but rather they stand steadfast, determined and looking forward to the future. A reconfiguring of body labor relations occurred via the picket line and the occupation of the assembly line during sit down strikes reflecting both the existence and limits of these incorporating practices. While forces of incorporation, whether the Ford Motor Company or the Detroit's our commission deployed architecture as a mechanism to the limit and contain, along with this aesthetics workers organizations equally use these spaces and others to enact their own agency. Thank you. Thank you. Let me just say to everyone, please put your questions in the Q&A section of our webinar so that we can, you know, I all moderate the questions for Jay. That was fabulous. It was wonderful to hear that story. It was funny. It was this kind of the manufacturer controversy is both hilarious and, you know, I mean, theological imagery and those paintings is so present. And yet, the kind of manufacturers is hilarious. And it's sort of also fascinating the story of just sort of drew us through what work this kind of space of display was doing, and you know the kind of counter work to the work of the body as labouring, not just not just in the factory but also politically in the streets outside of the factory. So, I'm going to just wait a second for more for some, for some wonder. Oh, Lucia. Okay, I'm going to read it, and then Jay I'll turn it over to you. Hi Jay for such a wonderfully carefully and precisely narrated deal. I wondered you find these union representations also sanitized and idealized the labour of unionizing. Yes, that's a that's a really great question. And the short answer is yes. There's there's a certain kind of idealization that's happening all around and you know this is also the 1930s this is like the period of social realism art and representation as well so it's it's very much within that strain of thinking and approach to representing the popular movements that are occurring. So, I would say it's for me it's less about one being real and one being idolized and more about the different forms of representation that occur right and the roles that they're playing and the kinds of projections that they're kind of putting together. So, I find it very interesting and compelling that the representations that are coming from the labour organizers aren't about championing work and labour very much at all. So, this is sort of in in what I showed but in sort of others that looked at as well that during this period they're very much focused on the work of organizing and the work of organizing becomes central to how they, it seems to how they think about themselves and the kinds of representations of workers that they put forward as opposed to the wage labour that is occurring within the factories. So, I have another question from someone anonymous. Thank you so much for this lecture Dr. Seacrest, this is more of a broad question. I am wondering how does metaphysics or specific or more specifically ontology play into your work, if it does. The lecture has made me think deeply of Orlando Patterson's social death in the way said you have reference dispossession. That's interesting. You know, I've read Orlando Patterson on social death quite closely several times over, and it is a framework for understanding dispossession and I would say oppression more generally that I find very useful. Although the way that he talks about social death is totalizing in a way that I don't think is what's occurring in these factory settings. I think social death is about a complete removal from sort of the social workings and sort of denial of participation in society where one is sort of rendered a non being essentially. So it's not parallel and of course he understands it in relationship to slavery and that's primarily where it's found its use and it's where I have found it helpful as well. Certainly, not only involvement in the social realm but also a matter of agency that is afforded to these factory workers despite also them being in a situation of being very much oppressed and repressed in many ways. And the fact of agency is what makes them such a great threat right and what then sort of feeds into this larger production of having to contain and restrict and delimit and use various means of inculcating them into a certain way of being precisely because there is so much potential power among them as a group. So that's a very different way I think of understanding or sort of figuring the power of a group compared to what social death compared to what what we sort of see from the conflict of social death so I find social death very helpful in other contexts but I would say not in this particular one. And Patrick Hoffman has a question. Do you see any parallels to relations between workers and corporations today in the US or other countries where manufacturing is more prevalent. And just to sort of add a piece to this you know I was thinking about your work on the fulfillment warehouse versus the city. And thinking about how that sort of almost conceptual like when we think about that in relation to for this for this and we think about maybe not manufacturing but the space of labor. And that you know means you always have to only talk about the factory. Anyway, so that was just a thought but I'll turn this question over to you. I don't follow labor as closely today as I do the historical labors I can't speak very much to it. There's one thing that I find very different and the sort of comes up in a work of mine that you mentioned in the introduction where I've been writing about the landscapes of logistics in relationship to Amazon that there's a overwhelming presence that industrial production and its factories had in the city in the 1920s and 30s. And the spatiality of industrial production is very much present. And so I find it very fascinating how the spatiality of some major corporations and aspects of production today are very much not present, or are distributed in certain parts of the globe but that is a kind of ideology of invisibility that goes along with production today. And so less sort of parallels, but some significant differences there. And so with that, I was sort of interested in thinking lots about what it means to have modes of production that do not have a certain kind of visibility in the urban realm, as they did historically, and how that shapes people's relationships or their understandings to those modes of production, and also potentially how that shapes how they think about or what did not they think about themselves as workers within those systems of production. As one book transitions to remote evidenced by this lecture being made available to those not present at Avery, how do you see architecture and worker-employer identities being a role in the social environment of work as it dematerializes? And so I find the dematerializing of labor very troubling and something that I think only disadvantages us. For any reason, because the materialization of any form of ideology, any kind of practice allows for its visibility, which then allows us to sort of engage with the ways in which it's sort of structuring and affecting our society in a lot of different ways, and all of that becomes much more difficult when it is dematerialized. And so I think this is precisely then why the kinds of aesthetic practices that I sort of talked about earlier become both so important and so powerful, because what they're doing is trying to materialize through these aesthetic renderings of the worker of factory processes as a way of being able to control or dictate specific narratives. And there's a way in which there is sort of full participation by many in that kind of process. And so in our current situation, the question I would ask is what kinds of narratives are being created to materialize this dematerialization of labor, right? What are the ways that we can or that we have sort of brought it to the forefront, whether that is through distinct aesthetic practices or other ways of kind of rendering it visible? And then Brent Patterson asks, thank you for your lecture. Are you aware of the current narrative communicated by guides at the museum today? And the extent to which it addresses the issues you raised, how do we incorporate restorative justice into such general slash institutional discussions? I mean, of course that raises the question of whether the museum might even have the capacity to hold that kind of a restorative narrative. Yeah, so I'm not sure what the museum is doing today. I do know that in the case of this particular museum, the DIA, that of course the Rivera Court is the most popular, most champion that's sort of the crown jewel of the entire museum and it's come to represent the city in many ways. There's many narratives to be told about this particular court and its sort of role and sort of forging aspects of the city's history. And so I can't answer this question as close as I want to because I don't know what that narrative is that you're sort of referring to that's being told about it today. But I think being able to offer a space to present multiple narratives is what would be key that seems to be the thing that would be important to you. So we don't have any more questions at the moment. So maybe I'll say a little bit more. I mean, it is really fascinating to be able to track the politics of display via the different moments when museums were through their different kind of financial structures, right? Like what you point out that's so important here is that there's this sort of financial crisis around the museum, even as it's building a narrative of its necessity as a kind of pedagogical space and what that kind. And so, I mean, I would imagine that, you know, I just think of something like the Natural History Museum here in New York having that one wall where it shows the scene of Thanksgiving. And it has sort of, you know, a counter narrative written on the on the on the glass screen in front of it that that sort of explains what you're looking at and explains the violence that is obscured in the diorama. And that kind of a story might would also play into sort of narratives of how the museum is trying to financialize itself now that so I guess what I'm trying to say is that we can only, I guess that kind of question can only be brought off in relation to the museum's current financial practices and its current kind of modes of bringing the fundraising. Yeah, I mean, I think that the financializing question is a really key one. Because there's a way in which the trajectory that I trace with the DIA and a lot of what I'm interested in with it occurs in part, well, almost entirely I think because it is a was no longer today but spent on history as a department of the city government, right so that it has this duty to the city as a public institution, and can't just be. It can't just be a forum for our enthusiasts, but that it has to have this sort of public orientation. That means that it has to raise money as well for itself. And so that forces it into this kind of public engagement that most museums could choose to do or choose not to do. If they're more privately held institutions that are finance, primarily by these are collectors who are already wealthy people who are backing them. And so the financial aspect of it, I think, really determined a lot of that history that comes after it right so the sort of need to have the publicity campaign to bring people in but also tying it directly to a kind of workers in the industrial and sort of broader history of the United States as a way of Americanizing them right sort of extending a practice that was already occurring in other institutions in the city and drawing that through the museum that they acted in as part of the part of the duty of the museum as a public institution I don't know that they would have taken that on as a task or sort of framed their understanding of the period rooms in that way, if the museum was just entirely privately backed because if it was entirely privately backed then it could just remain the sort of closed society for a handful of people who are interested in the artworks on display. So there's something about the public duty that forces this kind of orientation towards Detroit's working class. But in so doing, does it in a very paternalistic way very much in the model of what was happening with factories with with churches for instance, for instance with other large institutions that are attempting to basically inculcate workers into a different way of being. And then there's this fascinating way in which, even as it is this public institution run by the city of Detroit, right. It's still sort of a hinge between Ford and the city. And, and it's conceptualizing its audience as you know, laborers at Ford's factory. And so there's sort of this. I mean I just wonder if that's maybe a way to kind of think about the role for this playing in the politics of display because I know not but for doesn't this play in the politics, particularly because they did also have their own kinds of exhibitions and you know, aesthetic ways of presenting themselves. And so I'm wondering if maybe there's a moment to kind of talk about the way in which the city and the operation. Both engage in a kind of politics of display. Yeah, and I mean that's, I would say that's one, one of the aspects that I find the most fascinating and drove a lot of the research for the project for me was that these institutions weren't just a matter of industrialists like Ford having sort of projects that they engage in but an institution like the DIA that grew to be the fourth largest art collection in the United States with a very distinguished collection of art was single almost single handedly run by these four individuals for about 25 years. And one of them the president of Ford Motor Company. So the extent to which there, there is this, not just overlap but as you describe the hinge of sort of close working together of these individuals who have significant control over very large organizations and institutions in the city, on the one hand, organizations of reproduction, and then with the museum organizations that are involved with a kind of cultural reproduction. Then that comes to have an extraordinary effect on shaping the city, an extraordinary effective shape in the city and then this is why I find it particularly compelling then to understand the level of movement and organizing that was happening at the same time, as well. So that those kinds of politics of display, despite being so totalizing in some ways are not completely determining at all that there are these not just sort of very large movements of organizing, but different sort of channels or streams of display that are occurring in different places that are reaching perhaps just as many people that are potentially having just as much effect. But as a researcher it's harder to find those right in terms of archives and the things that people leave behind and you know finding out the names of artists for instance who are painting these murals that are inside a tiny local office of a union. So the, the mechanisms of display and the networks and the sort of aesthetic rendering is there, but it just becomes harder to sort of suss it out. Maybell has a question here. Thank you Jay for the excellent informative talk. Can you say more about the interpolated work of the river murals, and the DIA is collection more broadly as a means of defining a robust resilient culture of American this in parentheses whiteness and maleness among Detroit's because many of them immigrants. Yeah, so I think what's interesting, particularly about the murals, the river murals is the way in which they begin to play that role that they sort of function in that interpolation, I would say increasingly and perhaps in the compounding manner over time, more so than at that particular moment. Because of the controversy that was conjured around the murals initially, and from what I can tell that is most of how they were talked about for a few years right after of course, you know notably Rivera was fired from this commission at Rockefeller Center, a couple of years after painting the frescoes at the DIA. And it's only sort of later and over time that they really start to stand as a representation of Detroit and become sort of a source of pride. The representation I always find this really interesting as representation of the integration of labor and work, even though the assembly lines were not integrated during that time. And so what we're going to paint it is not something you would have seen. And it was actually a point of contention, particularly during this period that forward at so forward had made an agreement with the Detroit Urban League to hire a certain number of black workers in the factory, although they, they were only certain jobs that they were allowed to do. And black workers in Detroit were increasingly dissatisfied with that for good reason and wanted just to be able to have as many jobs as they could have rather than being restricted to certain jobs. So there was this kind of negotiation that was occurring for instance around issues of race in the factories and the murals reflect a kind of idealized tail that was told very much from the top actually, but the murals are presented to the public as a tail told from the bottom. But I would say that that understanding of the murals is not something that was the case in the 1930s, but sort of compounded over time and I would say the murals very much play that role. Or at least the museum presents them in that way continues to to this day. Right so some sort of forgetting had to happen for them to be properly incorporated into the narrative. Yeah well I mean I think that ultimately the murals is sort of any aesthetic rendering carries its own memory, right and so the stories. People read stories into them directly and take that up on their own even if they don't know the other sort of narratives that came out of that particular period, right so they sort of take on a life of their own. So to speak something about like when the courtyard was actually closed in and the sort of center I guess the centerpiece was taken out. You know the kind of changes that were made to the courtyard business is just something so interesting about seeing the images, you know, with the context of the wall is just so different from seeing them. Yeah. So, so one thing that's really interesting about the court is that the only thing that changes that there have been a pool of fountain in the center and that was taken out. And there had been some plantains and that was taking out. So all the plants were taking out, but the walls remain the same. That cray had had wanted to simplify the walls or that Valentina wanted to simplify the walls it just wasn't the money for it. It just makes the courtyard look very different. It actually makes it look as if there had been changes to the details of the plasters and other details but none of that has changed at all. And this is precisely the issue that cray had with it, which is that the murals as works of art interfere too much with the architecture and change one's conception of the architecture. And in a way that he felt was inappropriate instead of the architecture essentially being able to contain the artwork, the artwork was sort of pushing beyond the architecture and changing sort of one's conception of what was occurring there. So the changes to the court were quite minor, essentially pulling out the water and the plants that were in the court. I guess the roof may have come much later on. The garden had always been an indoor garden so it was built with the glass roof. Yeah, it was always there. Yeah, no, I mean, certainly because at least looking at the images. It feels like the wall almost falls away, right. It really explodes the kind of building just because of the way he uses perspective and all of the men. It's just such a funny story to hear them talk about how a modern room would not read as a room because I'm not even sure what they mean totally over there but as if some sort of lapse of critical distance has happened for modernism and so you're not able to see it as a style, which I find that unimaginable. Anyway, I guess we could maybe have you say one last thing and then thank everyone for coming. If there's anything that we should have asked but haven't asked. Well thank you so much for hosting me and for inviting me here it's been a pleasure to share this work. Well, thank you for the talk it was really wonderful. And goodbye everyone whom we cannot see, but we're here. Thank you.