Spoken of fondly by elders of my grandmother’s generation, Kingville, South Carolina, is now a ghost. A once promising railroad town and the former post-slavery home of my maternal kin, Kingville had been embraced by African Americans in the lower portion of Richland County; but because of various financial and environmental realities, the town had ceased to exist by the time I was born. Growing up in the shadows of the region’s slave plantations and the memories held and sustained by these brutal yet beautiful landscapes, home for me was marked by family, culture, tradition, and the various physical places where my loved ones and I lived and grew, laughed and wept, felt safe and unsafe, were vulnerable and strong.
Beauford Delaney, Untitled (Knoxville Landscape), 1922; Private Collection, Knoxville; © The Estate of Beauford Delaney, by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Court Appointed Administrator, photo by Bruce Cole
Looking back, I see that this upbringing and family history of displacement no doubt had a bearing on my scholarly career, which in sum has been a continuous engagement with and exploration of notions of home. It began with inquiries about the phenomenon of African American travelers and expatriates and a wide range of artists, all of whom were seeking out utopic ancestral African homelands to fulfill their desires for belonging and spaces to just be as they struggled with various societal pressures and real, perceived, and anticipated injustices in the United States. And, in a recent short memoir, I focused the microscope on myself, so to speak, forcing a kind of reckoning with all that I have felt as I endeavored to establish myself in cities and towns across the United States and even as I asked research questions of others—questions that I was grappling with personally, if silently.
During the 2010s, I made a home in Knoxville, Tennessee, an Appalachian city with a complex history. Local lore celebrated that great African American painter Beauford Delaney, who had been born and raised there a century before. Delaney left Knoxville after riots rocked the city during the Red Summer in 1919, eventually expatriating to Europe. Curious about how Delaney had experienced the city in the acute racial turbulence of the twentieth century, I began exploring his work and archives. I came away with a broad understanding of individual relations to home, space, and placemaking via Delaney’s paintings of real and imagined Knoxville landscapes, created over five decades. Each work indicates a major shift in how he viewed, remembered, and understood his hometown, as he had experienced both the security of family-as-home and the memory of unrest outside his own front door.
Excerpt from Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt | The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)
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Michelle D. Commander