Unearthing The Underground Library

Malene Barnett and Leyden Lewis, cofounders of the Black Artists + Designers Guild (BADG), explore and expand the possibilities of the archive within the physical confines of Andrew Carnegie’s former library at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, which is housed in the former home of the industrial magnate. BADG is a nonprofit organization pushing for justice in the worlds of art and design. The Underground Library is their site-specific project for Making Home. Black Artists + Designers Guild’s intervention in Carnegie’s library—a place for reflection, study, and socialization—is loaded.

Libraries permit experimentation. They are places where questions meet answers, places with peripheries but not borders. Their existence is proof of the indestructible nature of truth. Knowledge once released can never be contained again, but it can converge to generate new knowledge. BADG, which counts architects, interior designers, textile artists, furniture makers, and ceramicists among its members, is also an exercise in convergence. The Underground Library, as they have conceived it, aims to reflect the rich tradition of the library as a repository of storytelling and memory.

A bustling, central element to Carnegie’s domestic topography, the room in which the Underground Library lives, was once a nucleus from which the nineteenth-century tycoon plotted. Who was he, aside from one of the richest men in the world during his lifetime? How can one space be made to hold the ruthlessness of early capitalism alongside a seemingly earnest philanthropic urge? Carnegie embodied the American myth of upward mobility. He amassed his wealth in the steel industry and “gave back” once that wealth reached astounding levels, guarding his excess from critique by contributing to several causes, some of which, like most philanthropists, he was partially responsible for. Among his beneficiaries was the historically Black Tuskegee University, then named the Tuskegee Institute, under the direction of Booker T. Washington. At Tuskegee, he funded a library building, one of several such Carnegie libraries on historically Black college and university campuses. Although such an endeavor was righteous, Carnegie was still a man of contradictions—a pacifist who wouldn’t support his own steel workers union. Perhaps his library was a reflection of his complexity. Perhaps it was simply a vessel for his anxiety.

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)