The term “shotgun house” may sound foreign to residents living in South Florida today. That’s why 38-year-old artist Germane Barnes is shedding light onto this overlooked piece of history with a fun twist.
“I chose to create a playhouse,” Barnes said of his newest installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in North Miami. “One of the things I was taught when I was studying architecture is that if you design something for an 8-year-old and an 80-year-old, then everybody in between can still enjoy it, so that’s the sort of approach we go with.”
Barnes’ “Play-House” is a one-to-one scale architectural home. When Miami was first being built, Jim Crow laws required that Black residents live separately from whites. Early Black neighborhoods like Overtown and Coconut Grove consisted primarily of shotgun houses, simple dwellings common in the American South and characterized by their narrow structure. It wasn’t until there was better plumbing and infrastructure that people moved out of these houses.
(Daniel Block)
Germane Barnes' "Play-House" exhibit includes monkey rings for children to play with.
The history of shotgun houses is important because of their journey through the Atlantic slave trade, originating in West Africa and traversing through Haiti and Central America, and finally up through the Southeast United States. When someone looks at a shotgun home, they are seeing spatial awareness of Blackness being transported.
“Play-House” will be on view at MOCA through Nov. 17 as part of the museum’s second “Welcome to Paradise” public art series.
“All of the new commissions have had some level of the visitor being able to touch the work and physically put themselves into the artwork,” said curator Adeze Wilford.
For “Play-House,” Wilford said Barnes was inspired by the children at MOCA’s summer camp.
“As we walked through last summer’s space, the campers had their lunch break, and so he saw the artwork and immediately was like, ‘I know what I’m going to do,’” recalled Wilford. “He decided he was going to have a place for them to play.”
“This is my way of telling the history and then combining it with play structures like monkey rings, rock climbing, chalk board and a ball pit,” said Barnes. “It’s a way for kids to also be a part of that. So now they get to learn the history of their ancestors while also just having a chance to play and have fun during the summertime.”
Barnes accessed the Black archives housed at the Historic Lyric Theater in Overtown to inform the history behind his installation, available through educational QR codes on the physical piece.
Barnes is a tenured professor at the University of Miami and runs a research lab called Community Housing Identity Lab. He worked with five of his undergraduate and graduate students to build this piece, all of whom are people of color. Both graduate students are Black women.
“The difficult thing about architecture is that when you are a student of color, you don’t get that many opportunities to work on a lot of interesting things,” said Barnes. “A lot of the time, the field isn’t the kindest, especially to Black women.”
MOCA hosted a Summer Backyard BBQ last month to celebrate the ongoing installation. It was a vibrant tribute to the community with a host of engaging activities and insightful discussions, ending with a special one-on-one conversation between Barnes and fellow artist Dario Calmese, who is the first Black person to photograph the cover of Vanity Fair.
“I come from a place of really looking underneath the surface of things,” said Calmese. “I’ve worked with many architecture students and even artists, people who come from backgrounds that are not at the center of culture and they struggle to have their work interpreted. For me, I hope Germane and I make a good pair because on some level, I feel like I may have a more honest, deeper read on his work.”
During the conversation, the two discussed the larger legacy of architecture in the Black community and the shotgun house being a representation of that.
“Miami is a place that has really nurtured my career,” said Barnes. “It’s a place where I’ve been able to do a lot of research around space praxis and the Black diaspora, and I think that wouldn’t be possible somewhere else so early in my career.”