Size

Exhibit: 420 sq. ft. / 39 sq. m.

Year

2018

Status

Completed

Client

Equal Justice Initiative

Partners

Equal Justice Initiative, with volunteer work by local community members

Justin Brown, AIA, LEED AP

Justin Brown, AIA, LEED AP

Principal — Poughkeepsie

Justin is a co-founder and Principal at MASS focused on expanding architectural work in the U.S. He leads the Hudson Valley Office in Poughkeepsie, NY and is dedicated to the growth of MASS’s Social Justice and Adaptive Re-use portfolios. He was the Project Architect for the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice and founder of the Fringe Cities Design Lab, which researches vulnerable American cities and follows community-engaged design practices to unlock upstream capital to transform liabilities into assets.

Prior to MASS, Justin has led award winning projects at Gensler in Washington DC, Perez APC in New Orleans, and Toshiko Mori Architect in New York. He has guest lectured in seminars at Harvard Graduate School of Design, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, University of Toronto, and Dartmouth College. He holds a Master in Architecture from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.

Photo of Michael Murphy, Co-founder and CEO of MASS Design Group.

Michael Murphy

Founding Principal & CEO — Boston

Michael Murphy, Int FRIBA, is the Founding Principal and Executive Director of MASS Design Group, an architecture and design collective that leverages buildings, as well as the design and construction process, to become catalysts for economic growth, social change, and justice. Since MASS's beginnings, their portfolio of work has expanded to over a dozen countries and span the areas of healthcare, education, housing, urban development. MASS’s work has been published in over 900 publications and awarded globally. Most recently, MASS has been recognized as the winners of the national Arts and Letters Award for 2017 and the 2017 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award. Michael’s 2016 TED talk has reached over a million views, and was awarded the Al Filipov Medal for Peace and Justice in 2017. MASS's project, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice was named the single greatest work of American architecture in the 21st century. Michael has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, University of Michigan, and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. Michael is from Poughkeepsie, NY, and holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago.

The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has documented more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings in twelve Southern states between Reconstruction and World War II, in one of the most comprehensive investigations to date. Lynching profoundly impacted race relations in the United States, fueling mass migration from the South and creating a fearful environment where racial subordination and segregation was maintained for decades.

Soil Collection Jars

MASS was inspired by EJI’s dedication to recording this history that has gone undocumented for decades. In an effort to involve people more deeply in this process of recovery and reconciliation, we designed the process of soil collection, through which members of EJI would join members of the community in collecting soil from the sites where each of these lynchings took place.

Soil Collection Exhibit

The soil collection process created space for communities to confront this history by becoming active participants in the commemoration of life unjustly taken. Strongly rooted in place, the soil collection process served as a prelude to the Memorial to Peace and Justice.

Soil Collection Jars

The Memorial, which opened April 26, 2018, is a living monument to this history as counties gradually come to terms with their own histories of lynching and lay claim to markers from the memorial, which will be transported to each site over time.

Soil Collection Exhibit

Drawing on our commitment to community engagement, MASS supported EJI in developing an exhibition of the soil collection in EJI’s headquarters, as well as in the Legacy Museum.