Mabel O. Wilson

Mabel O. Wilson (’91 M.Arch) is the Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and a Professor and Chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Wilson served as the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies from 2020 to 2023 and co-directs GSAPP’s Global Africa Lab with Mario Gooden. Wilson joined the faculty of Columbia in 2007 and she has held full-time and visiting appointments at Yale University, University of Virginia, UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Princeton University, Ohio State University and the University of Kentucky. She is trained in Architecture and American Studies (‘07 Ph.D. NYU) two fields that inform her scholarship, curatorial projects, art works, and design projects.

Wilson’s research explores space, politics and cultural memory; race and modern architecture; and visual culture in contemporary art, media and film. She has authored Begin with the Past: Building the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (Smithsonian Books 2016) and Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (University of California Press 2012). She co-edited with Irene Cheng and Charles Davis the volume Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (University of Pittsburgh Press. 2020). Her essays have appeared in numerous journals, books, exhibition catalogues and online platforms on Architecture, Art, History, Black Studies, Critical Geography, Urban Studies, and Visual Cultural Studies.

Through her transdisciplinary practice Studio&, Wilson makes visible and legible the ways that anti-black racism shapes the built environment along with the ways that blackness creates spaces of imagination, refusal and desire. Wilson is a principal collaborator in the architectural team that completed the award-winning Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. Exhibitions of her work have been featured at Venice Architecture Biennale, SFMoMA, Art Institute of Chicago, Istanbul Design Biennale, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum’s Triennial, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture. For the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, she was co-curator of the exhibition “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021). Wilson is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture?, an advocacy project to educate the architectural profession about the problems of globalization and labor.

Wilson has received numerous awards including fellowships and grants from the American Academy in Berlin, The Center at the National Gallery of Art, The Getty Research Institute, MacDowell, Graham Foundation, and New York State Council for the Arts. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in History in 2023. In the spring of 2025, Wilson delivered the 74th Andrew W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 2021 the National Building Museum awarded the Vincent Scully Prize to Wilson. In 2011 she was honored as a United States Artists Ford Fellow in Architecture and Design. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Society of Architectural Historians.