@hoodmidcenturymodern:
Yes! There is MCM in The Hood

The Instagram Archivist Challenging the Whiteness of Historical Preservation

Text: Tiana Reid
Illustrations: Megan Tatem

Everyone agrees that gentrification happens: rising rents, displacement of working-class populations, sedimentation of racial disparities, architectural conformity. But Jerald Cooper, creator of @hoodmidcenturymodern, only used the word “gentrification” once during our conversation, and it wasn’t your typical take. His project, stemming from an Instagram account (37k followers and counting), doesn’t explore gentrification as much as talk around it, its prehistory for Black communities. “We don’t even fucking know our neighborhood,” he says. “I mean, generally speaking, nobody knows about these neighborhoods. Nobody knows who had originally settled there, what the functions of these neighborhoods were, why some of the people left, why people came. How do we protect things that we don’t know anything about?”

The expansive HOOD CENTURY project, then, becomes a place to study one’s surroundings, becomes a study of one’s place not in the world—that totalizing distant thing—but in one’s own neighborhood. The @hoodmidcenturymodern Instagram Linktree is a bit like a syllabus, listing a website about Black architect Paul Revere Williams, a podcast on how buildings relate to health and happiness, a Nowness documentary on Watts, Los Angeles, an academic paper called “Progressive Architecture for the Negro Baptist Church." And there’s music—a link to the blues musician Little Milton singing, “You know it hurts me so bad / To hear my baby say goodbye / That’s why I walked the backstreets / The backstreets and cry.”

With @hoodmidcenturymodern, Cooper has created a guide to the multidimensional realization of where you’re at. In the past ten years, he's lived in New York City, London, and Los Angeles, claiming the professional identity of a manager and creative director. Last year, though, at the Noah Davis show at David Zwirner, he realized he’s an artist now. From his mother’s “really cute deck” at his childhood row house in College Hill, Cincinnati, “Coop” and I discussed preservation societies, the Underground Railroad as Black design, Cleveland's Black literary history, and the difference between study and education.

Tiana Reid

Jerald Cooper

How has your thinking about @hoodmidcenturymodern shifted from when you first started it to today?

Man, everything shifted. You’re gonna think this is funny, but this is my first ever… What do they call it? Friendsta or something?

Finsta!

I was like, “Ooh, and I’m just gonna make this Hood Century. I wanna show my boys this.” ‘Cause I had done like a little-bitty case study, if you will, a fake case study on my regular Instagram. And I was like, “Oh, now I'm just gonna do this other Insta called @hoodmidcenturymodern.” It’s just gonna be a project. But I’m probably just gonna be spying on the homies, liking the aesthetic. And then what I started to see was people understanding, like, “Oh, that is mid-century modern. Okay, I’m vibing with that.”

Around late January, I really started to see this could be something significant. But it wasn’t until May when I’m hearing a lot of people say, like, “Bro, you’re preserving,” and I was thinking, “Okay, so this could be like the new wave of a preservation society.” And then one day, I had my team up and I was like, “We’re a preservation society.” And they’re like, “What!?” I was like, “Yeah, we’re doing acts of preservation right now.” And that’s when it really hit.

How would you describe what a historical preservation society is or does if someone is like, “What the fuck is that?”

I love mocking. I’m a mockingbird. I’m obsessed with the cleverness and wittiness and humor, and the intellect that comes with mocking. You think about a mockingbird, these motherfuckers have to be in the right position. I always like systems that actually appear to be dope, and then I put our swag on it: the hip-hop, the African-American, the Black identity, the urban America. I put our swag on it. I kind of mock it, but I do it better.

We actually need representation around preservation. We don’t need nothing else. We just need people who give a fuck that can be like, “Whatever, let’s buy it.”

Historical preservation society, when you say that shit, it makes you wanna fall asleep. Historical preservation, it felt stiff. When I think about it, it feels white. It feels so far away, even. It feels not even attainable. Who are these people that deem these houses, or these structures, relevant or worth preserving? It really felt countries away—even in my own city.

My childhood church was going through this very nasty and long sort of preservation battle locally, which we lost. And I was nowhere to be found. I was just galavanting, enjoying my life, kind of listening in. It’s not the reason I started it, but it’s maybe one of the reasons why I was comfortable enough to say: We need this as a culture. We actually need representation around preservation. We don’t need nothing else. We just need people who give a fuck who can be like, “Whatever, let’s buy it.”

What has it been like viewing your childhood neighborhood, College Hill, through the eyes of @hoodmidcenturymodern?

You’re going to think this is off subject but Cincinnati, is the frontier for African Americans seeking freedom during the years of slavery via the Underground Railroad. Cool?

Cool.

But Black people are coming here, seeking our freedom. And then College Hill is what I call the first ascent. So it’s the first time that you would go up a really big hill. You’re on your Underground Railroad, College Hill is the first time you would go up. I just found out, mostly during this exploration of homes here, that we have four to six safe houses from the Underground Railroad that are in my neighborhood. I can walk to them.

I don’t know whether you’ve noticed that the Underground Railroad, the branding and marketing of it, really sucks. What is it? Most people think it’s the Underground Railroad. People now, people notice it, the safe house. Like runaway slaves were hiking. We know that there was navigation by starlight. It’s so much more that we haven’t talked about. The abolitionists! I think that they don’t get enough. It was white people trying to help us out, and more specifically, the Presbyterian Church was really fucking with us, more than any other churches. But, I’ve just been learning that, sis, and that’s been such a great thing. Nobody’s ever connected the relationship that we have with design given some of our struggle, especially on the Underground Railroad. We were only, only, only, only, only, only looking for houses. Architecture. We were looking for safe houses. Now, the safe houses were in different forms. So you had to hear somebody tell you something, or you had to look at a quilt, or you had to have some sort of remembrance of an aesthetic quality of a built thing. You know when you have a picture of somewhere? Maybe even you have a picture of somewhere in your head. Somewhere visual that maybe somebody described to you. And then do you know what that’s like—I imagine, psychologically—having that burned into your memory? It’s so tough. And the other side of it be, if you don't remember it, you’re risking your life.

In terms of the Instagram account itself, the captions do a lot of different work. Sometimes the captions will be highlighting an architect. Sometimes the captions will be more emotional. But either way, it comes from this sense of curiosity that I think people relate to. How do you think about matching words with images?

You know how it is, man. The buildings get you so excited. You look at a building and it gives you something. And they might give you something that you’re willing to share. And that’s how I look at it. I won’t say I’ve always been a writer, but Nikki Giovanni from out here. She grew up out here. You know what I mean? Toni Morrison is from my state. Langston Hughes went to high school in Cleveland. So, I’m around a lot of writers, and I don’t take it lightly that if I wanna teach, or if I want people to relate to me and I want to relate to them, that we have to have commonalities.

I wanna make people feel. Even in a casual interaction, I want to be able to be in a native way, in myself, because I’m proud of myself. So I would love to bring myself into the conversation. It’s like, how are you excluding yourself? And I was the AOL caption motherfucker, I used to be sick at them. This is an extension of that.

Do people send you photos?

People send me photos, I go to they photos. You give me your IG, you and me are gonna be interacting. And then, I’m going to go to your friends' photos. I’d be searching, I’d be on this hunt. All my friends tell me that they don’t know how to see these buildings. They’re like, “Man, I wish I could send you pictures, but I just don't know.” And one of my buddies just told me, “Bro, I’ve been studying your page and now I feel confident enough to go into my pictures and send you some mid-century moderns.” And I was like, “You!” So that’s a special learning. When we talk about the dark school, and some of these other ways that we’re gonna start to formulate, we got to start to understand how education works for us.

You went to Montessori school. What was your experience like? How do you feel about alternative education?

Montessori was everything. Montessori’s a religion to me, you know what I’m saying? It’s a belief system. My mom had to be very brave, I imagine, to try that. ‘Cause Cincinnati was offering Montessori at a public-school level citywide for the first time of any city in the country. Before, it was a kind of a kindergarten thing. Maria Montessori out of Italy had brought it over to America. And me and my brother were like guinea pigs of that, at Montessori. So this is all a hood mom, elevating, trying to get her kids into this alternative type of school. Montessori had us meditating early. When you learn alternatively, then there’s more options in the world for all things. Like how to peel an orange, you could peel it so many different ways. That’s for real. It was expansive, and this really helped me imagine the world.

What images of the hood do you think are most prominent in American minds and culture? Because scrolling through @hoodmidcenturymodern, the experience is almost at once not what I expect, but it’s also what I see all around me. It produces this weird paradox.

It’s very paradoxical. I think even the approach obviously has layers to it. The Hood mid-century. Not all the times you see the hood is it disarray and neglect. Growing up in places, you identify these places by their unkemptness. But the irony that you would then have a critiquing eye on a design feature, that’s kind of different.

Beyoncé has this aesthetic in a lot of her stage shows, where she takes the hood elements—Houston, Fourth Ward, and all of that stuff. A lot of people always see [the hood aesthetic], but they don’t often get to study it. But it’s also how we see the world. So like, how would we see the Guggenheim? We will see that shit pink with some lines on the top of that joint. That’s how we would view that in our imaginations. I wanna go there. I love being in and out of different realities, or in them at the same time.