This is a calling and a heeding of a call. This is an homage to the rooting and uprooting of a people, the nest eggs, the off-limits parlors, the sideboards, the groaning boards, the hope chests and chests of drawers, the good porcelain and cushioned chairs reserved for the grown, the growing, and the gone on to glory.
Hadiya Williams, A rendered table in the artificial-intelligence program Midjourney that inspired a custom-designed dining table in The Offering; © Hadiya Williams
Perhaps this is the place where we suture the wounds, where we say things from the heart, from the soles of our feet, the place where we work it out in a dining room of our dreams.
“It’s always there . . . this binding together of these terrestrial things.”
HADIYA WILLIAMS
“I would always pick the sweetest blackberries.”
NICOLE CROWDER
“I always wanted it to be about movement and maps, wayfinding.”
HADIYA WILLIAMS
Always, always, always, we begin with “always,” a desire for permanence, a yearning for the eternal.
Nicole Crowder and Hadiya Williams, two multimodal designers inspired by the sacred material culture of Black interiors,[1] are descendants of the migratory Black South. These artist collaborators hold differing memories of their origin story, like most kin. Crowder remembers meeting at a celebratory brunch gathering of Black women. Williams finds it hard to pinpoint where they first shared space, but she recalls there being an exchange of stories of Black people engaged in the act of flight.
One of their most emotionally affective recollections is the archival-inflected exhibition they participated in at an antebellum historic space in 2018, once witness to human slavery, the Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey House Historic Site in Arlington, Virginia. Here Crowder and Williams reclaimed the humanity and wonder of those whose labors and lives often go unnamed and unknown, by installing a dining space for those once forced to serve.
The dream behind the tablescape and surroundings of The Offering is not bound by the era of slavery, or any time, for that matter. It grew, instead, out of a shared desire to contend with the search for home.
Crowder and Williams see objects—carried and found along the way—as metaphor and material evidence of “a new home.” They center the sacred place for commemorative and speculative ceremony at a “new altar,” the dining table.
Notes:
[1] See Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2004).
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)
Passengers waiting for their train at Penn Station in New York City, photographed by Marjory Collins, 1942. Lanier writes, “The recollection of wandering ways and wondering days.” Credit: Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information photography collection (Library of Congress)
Thomas Day, Quartette tables, 1858, Collection of the North Carolina Museum of History. Crowder says, “the table is the centerpiece . . . and [Thomas Day’s] work has been serving as an inspiration.” Photo courtesy of North Carolina Museum of History
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Michelle Lanier