From the perspective of architectural phenomenology, our built environments have a greater influence on us than we realize. They have an impact on our physical, emotional, and psychological well-being, particularly now as we spend the majority of our time indoors. These spaces inform our habits, moods, and behaviors, as well as our perspectives on everyday life. The meanings and experiences we gain from this interaction strengthen not only our relationships with others, but also our relationships with our surroundings. What are some of the ways that architecture can address this? The principle of wabi-sabi embodied in Japanese architectural and design aesthetics is one particularly effective way. According to Wabi-sabi, the best way to experience our everyday life is by letting go of the chaos and distractions that take away from these experiences. Wabi-sabi argues that when we do this, we become more conscious of our interactions with others and our environments. These shared experiences become far more precious to us, and this is the key to a fulfilling life. This relationship between space and finding meaning and purpose in our lives is what this project aims to examine.

Black Americans have created one of the most specific, complex, subtle, and multifaceted cultures in the world. The originality, potency, and value of Black American culture is reflected in the art, aesthetics, and imagination which can be found in that culture. The music, literature, performance and visual art of Black Americans has been a major foundation for what is considered popular art and culture today. What’s more, Black American art and aesthetics have been critical to the formation of the Black American identity. There are also crucial connections between Black political/social movements and Black art/aesthetics, one of them being the fact that many of the major movements in both Black politics and Black Arts acted as sister movements, each contributing to the other in major ways. This research project will employ both the Literary Pan-Africanism framework as well as the Kawaida Paradigm in order to effectively explore the phenomena of Black American art, aesthetics, and imagination as identity. These theoretical frameworks will help to effectively analyze the Black American individual and the larger, communal Black American experience by placing the individual, the community, and the art, aesthetics, and folklore which come out of both at the center of the project. In essence, this project seeks to understand, critique, explore, and analyze Black art, aesthetics, and imagination by centralizing the experience, voice and insularity of Black American culture.

The history of experiences in race, gender, and class has repeatedly excluded the representation of Black women in several spaces despite Black women existing in each of these identities to improve and change the lives of minorities in America. One space in particular where this is seen is within art history, and its many fields of art, specifically, printmaking. As a result, the development of Black Feminist Thought has occurred as a form of consciousness that critiques and redefines Black women’s existence based on their invisibility in history, as well as their tendency to advocate for multiple identities. However, there is less focus on Black women in art and how they can function through the lens of this theoretical framework. My paper adds to the discussion of Black women artists and how their art can be interpreted and applied to the framework of Black Feminist Thought. Specifically, I will be looking at 20 different prints by 10 Black women within printmaking and interpreting the connection between their experiences and the representation of printmaking in history. This will allow for me to discuss these works and the artists based on the framework of Black Feminist Thought through ideas based on the existence, definitions, roles, and invisibility of Black women in art history. I argue that by looking at these works from the lens of Black Feminist Thought, an alternative way of interpreting the artworks of Black women can allow for further discussion on this topic within art history.