DC, Someday, Somewhere

DC, Someday, Somewhere is a series of scenes made with Midjourney, a program that creates images from text prompts using generative artificial intelligence. I have used this tool to conjure hundreds of scenes that insist on the existence and inevitability of Black joy and abundance.

Black farmers appropriating a flooded tidal basin as a rice field and wading pool, 2023; © Curry J. Hackett

Dozens of bundles of dried tobacco leaves fill walls around two works of art and one area hung with five cast iron pans. One work of art is of a dark-skinned woman wearing blue clothing, a head covering, and apron as she holds and stirs in a bowl.

While I consider these images to be part dream, part memory—fictional near-futures—they are rooted in the very real cultures and histories that structure Black daily life.

One young Black woman styles the hair of another as the sun sets on her pink kiosk near the edge of a body of water. The customer sits outside with some of her long dreads wrapped up on her head and some long down her back.

A Black woman-owned beauty kiosk at the fish market along the Potomac River, 2023; © Curry J. Hackett

The series takes inspiration from memories of my “chosen” home of Washington, DC, from 2008 to 2020. The images look to bodies of water, streetscapes, and infrastructure as plausible sites of reclamation by Black Washingtonians in a speculative future.

About a dozen Black men and women drive aquatic three-wheelers through lily pads as blossoms fly high into the air. The far shoreline is edged with trees between buildings to our left and right.

Black youth ride aquatic four-wheelers through lily pads in bloom at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens, 2023; © Curry J. Hackett

Moreover, these scenes cross-pollinate Black life in DC with other Black aquatic cultures of the American South—Southern Appalachia, South Carolina’s Lowcountry, and the Mississippi Delta were of particular interest in the creation of this series.

A Black man sits in a streetcar at the end of an aisle running between seats covered in vividly colored quilting. The man crosses his ankles, rests his hands in his lap, and looks out the window to our left. The city is blurry out the windows.

A quilted streetcar cruising down H Street NE, 2023; © Curry J. Hackett

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)

A kiosk with a four-sided, tall, narrow pyramid sits on the corner of a city street. A person sits inside the structure, which is glass on all four sides. Dozens of people, most or all of them Black, mill or walk around the area.

Black-owned food kiosks, invoking the Washington Monument’s pyramid, along Pennsylvania Avenue, 2023; © Curry J. Hackett

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