teaching
Dr. Matthew Jordan-Miller Kenyatta posed at the Charles Library at Temple University, North Philadelphia (October 29, 2024)
I’m thrilled to announce my new role as the Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at Temple Contemporary within the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. Starting this late November 2024, I’ll have the privilege of leading exhibitions and programs that bring art, community, and possibility to the forefront.
Read More“In life, we hide the parts of ourselves that we don’t want them to see.
We lock them away.
We tell them ‘No.’
We banish them.
But here…we don’t.
Welcome to Montero.”
This bibliography bears witness to the groundbreaking sonic journey of MONTERO as a sacred geography, a speculative space for liberation, an innovative incursion into the cultural zeitgeist of “genre” that would traditionally marginalize queer Afrofuturist voices. It connects the expansive spatial imaginary of the already-prolific emerging artist Montero Lamar Hill, known as “Lil Nas X” (LNX), to geographies of architectural and design thought – fashion, folklore, myth, fantasy, fiction, filmic production, archaeology, land policy. It aims to help students and fans of his growing body of work grapple adeptly with the pluriverse of meanings he unlocks in visual culture, asking: Where do his musical adventures take us? What spatial concepts and transhistorical sources would be helpful in unpacking each song’s visual register? #MonteroSyllabus
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Gave My First Lecture for New Course at Penn on Placemaking
CPLN 582: Place, Taste, and Urban Change: Frameworks for Integrating Aesthetics, Equity, and Creativity
On January 23, 2019, I gave my first lecture for my new elective class at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design called ‘Place, Taste, and Urban Change’. Wonderful to have a class full of curious, thoughtful students in fine arts, historic preservation, city planning, architecture, and design; some even from outside of Penn. I’m right where I need to be! Thankful for everyone who pushed and prayed me to this point.
I did my best to channel the affirming, thoughtful energy of all my favorite teachers and professors who inspired my path - my high school teacher Anne Duff, my undergraduate thesis advisor Allyson Hobbs at Stanford, my USC doctoral chair Lisa Schweitzer, my intro to city planning professor Xav Briggs at MIT, Bruce Lenthall at Penn Center for Teaching and Learning, and so many more unnamed, amazing communicators and mentors who have taught me.
For the class, I’m centering the subject of neighborhood identity, and arts role in changing or preserving it through placemaking. It is an expanded field of practice that needs to integrate the best science behind aesthetics and social equity. Here’s my first crack at how we can do that, particularly for evaluating it! Hoping the learners who signed up find it valuable.
For the fellow nerds out there, my reading list includes:
Cara Courage’s Creative Placemaking: Theory, Research, and Practice.
Gordon C.C. Douglas’s The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy & Inequality in the DIY Urbanism
George Lipsitz’s Footsteps in the Dark: Hidden Histories of Popular Music and How Racism Takes Place
S.G. Gabrielle’s Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experiences.
Mark Stern and Susan Seifert’s Social Impact of the Arts Project
Michael Agar’s The Professional Stranger: An Introduction to Ethnography.
(Probably too) many articles in the journal Cultural Geographies.
Shoot me an e-mail if you want a copy of the syllabus! It’s honestly a class I wish I had been able to take when I first began my journey into urban studies.
