ArchitectureSuede Pews, Gospel Blues
by Mark A. Lark
Two spaces that shaped the beginnings of my positionality as a child: The tabby slave house at the Kingsley
Plantation, and the southern Baptist church I went to
upon my arrival in Jacksonville, Florida.
Clip-on tie, pleated slacks with the crease down the middle – I’m ready to go. The women of the church were
like black hummingbirds with their elegant crowns and
the vivacious flapping of their church fans. Churches
with air conditioning were sacrilegious. You ain’t been
churched yet until you sweated out your Easter colors.
One could say the steeply-pitched ceiling magnified our
voices for God’s ears. The Black Church, which was
born as an act of resistance and liberation, wasn’t really
performing as the vessel it proclaimed to be. Our interpretation of God’s home merely stopped at metaphor. I
wanted to touch God.
“Fly. And maintain your
spirituality your way,
young man.”
- Mother, Athena Lark
The pews were matriarchal, but they limited egress and
compartmentalized the communal experience of black
identity, relegating it to the outside – ending the physical
conversation between the black congregation and the architecture. The spiritual conversation continued outside
the building, but without the refuge, absent of sanctuary.
For black congregations, the traditional church spatial
order is repressive, because it was inherited from the
oppressor, who had a very different cultural practice
of space and spirituality. This spatial order is still prevalent in many southern Baptist black churches and has
evolved very little. Churches have become empty shells
of a movement in the black community. Black theology
of liberation has failed to malleate and has been unrooted from this new insurgency of liberation, which refutes
any restraint of gender, sexuality, and respectability politics. What do postcolonial modes of freedom look like?
My skepticism still remains, but so does my spirituality.
There’s a reason why, after a night out, the post-club
let-out feels like an impromptu family reunion. Architecture expires, but the spatial praxis, the cultural ritual,
remains relevant and familial. The church never leaves
us. God’s chords are communal, but her diminished keys
never diminished me. They dimensioned me.
Home, photo by Mark A. Lark
Orlando’s Art Scene, v. 1.3
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