sekou cooke STUDIO

15-81, a 2022 exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse NY, was inspired by Sekou Cooke’s project We Outchea: Hip-Hop Fabrications and Public Space alongside documents relating to the 15th Ward in Syracuse, New York. Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in 2021 for their exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, We Outchea focuses on the ever-present and persistent legacy of placement and displacement of Black residents. The project also considers various events in the city’s history—the razing of the historic 15th Ward, the building of multiple public housing projects, and the construction of Interstate-81—while simultaneously critiquing recent proposals, such as Blueprint 15, to replace low-income communities with mixed-income housing.

Accompanying the We Outchea project in the exhibition are photographs and ephemera telling the history of the once vibrant 15th Ward, a primarily Black neighborhood demolished in the 1950s in the name of urban renewal.

This destruction made way for the construction of I-81 through the center of downtown Syracuse as well as a planned Community Plaza, which incorporated government and cultural buildings situated within a pedestrian friendly environment. Included in these plans was space for a new art museum—the future home of the Everson.

With the imminent removal of the I-81 viaduct through downtown Syracuse, as well as the planned overhaul of the Pioneer Homes campus, both of which are within blocks of the Everson Museum, Cooke’s piece provides a possible glimpse of a Syracuse future of entrepreneurship and innovation while also asserting that the city must not forget its past. 

The design assistants for We Outchea were Kyle Simmons, Pin Sangkaeo, Benson Joseph. Photo documentation for Sekou Cooke: 15-81 by Julie Herman.