Launching the Museum of Hidden Genius: My Essay on Geographies of Black Genius

All my career, I’ve been thinking about maps.

Who draws them.

Who gets included.

Who gets erased.

For the past few years, I’ve been circling a question:

What if Black genius could be mapped—not just through monuments or protest—but through invention, everyday brilliance, the places and people left out of the archive?

Today, I’m proud (and a little in awe) to share my latest piece, Geographies of Black Genius, published in Places Journal.

This essay is more than research—it’s a love letter to the hidden, the buried, the overlooked. It’s about preservation beyond plantations, about honoring Black landscapes that hold invention and imagination.

It’s also part of a larger project: the Museum of Hidden Genius. I’ve been building this quietly, gathering stories, artifacts, and dreams to create a prismatic atlas of Afrotech—one that weaves together ritual, design, and memory.

The map isn’t finished. It never will be. But today feels like a marker.

I hope you’ll read the piece. I hope it stirs something in you.

And when you’re ready—help me finish the map.

Read here: Geographies of Black Genius — Places Journal

https://placesjournal.org/article/geographies-of-black-genius/

Explore the Museum (soft launch): museumofgenius.com

The Geometry of Light & Time: HanHo, Terry Adkins, Amanda Williams

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What if light wasn’t just illumination—but memory made visible?
What if color wasn’t just surface—but archive?
What if sculpture wasn’t just form—but breath held across time?

In The Geometry of Light & Time, I found myself drawn into a trio of works that use the visual not just as spectacle, but as structure. HanHo’s pulsing light beams stretch across space like memory itself—luminous, rhythmic, holding silence and intensity in equal measure. Terry Adkins’ monumental Klein-blue steel feels less like a sculpture and more like a signal—rising like a sentry of ancestral knowing. And Amanda Williams? She quite literally grounds it all: reviving George Washington Carver’s forgotten Alabama soil pigment, transforming the wall into a living, chromatic archive of Black innovation.

Together, these artists push me to ask:
What if duration isn’t the best measure of importance?
What if vibration is? Exploring memory through color, light, and form.

Light and structure here don’t just show—they testify. Adkins, Williams, and HanHo each use their materials like time travelers, encoding stories into pigment, steel, and illumination. The result is a geometry where memory isn’t just remembered—it’s refracted.

These works let us stand inside history reimagined. They explore how attention and memory can live in the blue of soil, in the pulse of a light fixture, or in the bold stillness of a steel form.

This isn’t just “pretty” light. This is architecture made from reclaiming what’s been buried or forgotten. You don’t just look at this work—you feel it glowing under your skin. Time bends. Memory shines. And blue becomes a portal to presence.

My First 100 Days as Director

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This week marked my first 100 days as the Director of Temple Contemporary!

From day one, I’ve been committed to listening—deeply and widely—to the Temple community and our neighbors along the North Broad corridor. As both Director and neighbor, I wanted to hear your vision for the future of arts and culture in our area.

So I asked two simple but expansive questions:

  1. How should Temple Contemporary make the public feel—including you?

  2. What would make this place an unforgettable destination for Temple University and North Philadelphia?

If folks were already familiar with the gallery, I added a third:What have you loved about what we’ve done in the past?

To make space for these conversations, I offered a variety of meeting times—afternoons, evenings, mornings, even select Saturday slots. Beyond those scheduled chats, I had dozens of impromptu dialogues with artists, students, faculty, and community members, both in Philly and beyond.

I traveled to Los Angeles for Frieze to reconnect with personal influences and soak in how contemporary art functions in other cities. I visited regional institutions like Haverford College and Fleisher Art Memorial to see how other teaching-based galleries are building public engagement.

Meanwhile, I began seeding new initiatives:

  • WE MAKE: Emerging Heritage, Forgotten Futures – a public history workshop to preserve Temple Contemporary’s archival legacy

  • A short introductory video, now available below, offering a glimpse into who I am and what drives this next chapter.

A few things I’ve learned so far:

  • Joy, justice, and genius are shared values across faculty, staff, and neighborhood audiences.

  • The vision for a cross-disciplinary, integrative gallery space resonates widely—but making it real will require shifts in practice and investment.

  • Themes of public memory, play, and wonder offer strong connective tissue between our values and our future programming.

More to come soon about how I’ve arrived at these insights—and what they may mean for short- and long-term goals.

Until then,
Dr. Matt
Director, Temple Contemporary

World Tour of KENYATTA Documentary (Hollywood and London)

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World Tour of KENYATTA Documentary (Hollywood and London)

The festival run of our documentary Kenyatta: Do Not Wait Your Turn was life-changing. Here are some moments to remember from both the British Film Institute's QTBIPOC-centered Flare Festival in March 2023 and the Outfest Festival in Hollywood for the U.S. premiere at the famed Chinese Theatre, featuring Al Roker himself moderating a film team panel afterwards.

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New role at Penn

It’s official! You’re looking at the first Director of Justice x Belonging (JxB) at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. Additionally, my postdoctoral faculty role is being extended an additional year!

I am honored to help build just futures through an institution that plays such a determining role in the health of our city & world. But we got work to do.

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Forging academic spaces in justice & belongingness is a marathon I’ve been on since I was 19. At 28, when I came to Penn, I thought my only job was to publish, teach, & get a tenure-track role. At 31, I see classroom happen in the streets & how justice is discipline-defiant.

Universities themselves are sites where real-world possibilities are practiced but where problems can be reproduced. Today, I am seeing that God had additional roles in mind in my journey as an educator. Transforming the culture of academia in which my work is transmitted can make universities into places that prototype true democracy, beloved communities, & networks of mutuality in our cities. I didn’t expect to emerge from this horrible year feeling that way, but here I am. 

Looking forward to sharing more of where my initial priorities are in shaping how we continually decolonize our School - horizontally - across departments, research centers, & design professions of architecture, fine art, planning, preservation, real estate, and spatial analytics. Stay tuned!