The first biography of a preeminent postwar architect who championed the cause of freedom through architecture and transformed Black history and modernism
J. Max Bond Jr. (1935-2009) was a civil rights activist, educator, and architect who shaped such iconic structures as the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan. Driven by the concerns of the civil rights movement, he insisted on a practice centered on deep social engagement during years when his profession became preoccupied with celebrity and spectacle.
Harvard educated and son of an eminent African American family, Bond designed housing, cultural institutions, community centers, and campuses amid an era of sweeping changes in architecture, urbanism, and American culture. He expressed an architectural vision that was democratic and inclusive, international in orientation, and celebratory of cities and their diverse residents. Yet his work has often been overlooked. Award-winning historian Brian Goldstein renders it visible.
Beautifully illustrated, Max Bond is the definitive biography of one of the most important architects of our time, whose aspiration toward an architecture by and for the people was as urgent in his day as it remains in our own.
Brian D. Goldstein is associate professor of architectural history in the Department of Art and Art History at Swarthmore College. He is the author of The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem (Princeton).
Goldstein will be joined in conversation with Steven Nelson, the inaugural Executive Director of the Sam Gilliam Foundation. Professor emeritus of art history and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and former dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, he has published widely on the arts, architecture, and urbanism of Africa and its diasporas and on queer studies. Nelson has presented the Richard D. Cohen Lectures on African and African American Art at Harvard University and has held visiting appointments at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. While at UCLA, he also served as director of the African Studies Center. Both at UCLA and the National Gallery, he advanced diversity, equity, access, and inclusion and contributed to institutional strategic planning. Nelson is a member of Boards of Trustees of the Kress Foundation, the Bard Graduate Center, and Educare DC. He is a member of the Society of Architectural Historian’s 2021 as well as the Association for Art History’s 2022 Class of Fellows. Nelson earned a BA in studio art from Yale University and an AM and a PhD in art history from Harvard University.