50 Time October 3, 2016Time OffReviews
explicit about creating a narrative
construction, making signifiers that help
the museum to explain itself,” he says.
Another way he did that was by
cutting large apertures in the lattice
work at crucial points. The fiveacre
parcel occupied by the museum was
the last buildable site on the National
Mall and one of the best located,
directly across from the Washington
Monument, with views overlooking
the Lincoln Memorial, the National
Archives Building and the White House.
By opening sight lines to those resonant
places, Adjaye ties the AfricanAmerican
saga into the widescreen narratives
of U.S. history. Yet at the same time
his museum looks very different from
most of official Washington. His metal
exterior is distinctly modern, and on
a Mall dominated by neoClassical
piles of pale marble and limestone,
decidedly, deliberately dark. Adjaye
is well known for his darker palette.
One of his first residential projects in
London was a blackwalled cube called
the Dirty House. His Sugar Hill building
is graphite gray. “Lonnie and I agreed,”
he says, “that having a dark presence on
the Mall would be a beautiful thing.”ThaT presencewas a century in the
making. The idea originated in 1915
with black Civil War veterans whoAmerica was the place they built.
Lonnie Bunch III, the museum’s
founding director, was once head of the
Chicago Historical Society, and before
that an associate director of the Smith
sonian’s National Museum of American
History, so he’s given a lot of thought
to this storytelling business. He says
he wants people to understand that his
new institution is “a museum of Ameri
can history, but one that uses African
American culture and history as a lens to
understand it. When you walk into this
museum you will absolutely see ‘insider
stories’ about black life. But the goal is to
bring those back to broader questions,
a broader story about America.”
That’s an idea carried out by the
building’s design, which is chiefly the
work of British architect David Adjaye,
who was born in Tanzania to Ghanaian
parents. (He teamed up for this project
with several U.S. firms, including the
Freelon Group, the SmithGroup and
Davis Brody Bond.) Adjaye—whose
other American works include Denver’s
Museum of Contemporary Art; Sugar
Hill, a mixeduse affordablehousing
development in Manhattan; and an
ingenious neighborhood library in
Washington—says symbolic gestures
like the museum’s exterior are deliberate.
“The whole project that Lonnie was
trying to do drove me to be much morehad gathered in Washington to mark
the 50th anniversary of the war’s end.
They formed a committee to promote
a monument on the Mall to the
achievements of African Americans.
By 1929 Herbert Hoover had even
established a commission to devise a
plan for a museum, but nothing came
of it until Georgia Representative
John Lewis, a leader of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
in the 1960s, arrived in Congress in
1987 and began introducing legislation
every year to make the project a reality.
Despite the dogged opposition of North
Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, by 2003
there was enough bipartisan support for
a bill to gain passage and be signed by
George W. Bush, a major supporter.
Two years later Bunch was hired
as director. All he needed to do was
create a museum from the ground up.
Because Congress was going to provide
only half of what ended up being the
$540 million initial cost of the project,
Bunch spent a lot of time raising funds
from private donors, including some
very famous ones. Michael Jordan gave
$5 million. Oprah Winfrey’s foundation
provided $21 million, which is why the
museum’s theater is named for her.
To build a collection, Bunch
launched a series ofAntiques Road-
show–style events in cities across the1862 Emancipation Proclamation
booklet printed for Union soldiers to
give to African Americans1860 Iron shackles with child-size
cuffs measuring 1¾ in. by 2¼ in.
1830s Nat Turner’s Bible
1939 Marian Anderson’s dress from
her Lincoln Memorial concert