Each curl is mighty — Black hair as architecture
UH professor has created an innovative art exhibition
ASaturday afternoon ritual: get in the shower; saturate hair until it is thoroughly damp; rinse with apple cider vinegar to remove any residual product; part hair into eight sections; massage through detangling shampoo of your choice; use wide-tooth comb to detangle (to the best of your ability — there’s a lot of hair); rinse; rub in several palmfuls of leave-in conditioner; comb again; towel off. This is only the beginning. Loosely twist hair into eight sections; amass arsenal of spray bottles; moisturizer; combs of various sizes; turn on TV show of your choice, something that you don’t have to pay too much attention to; then slowly but surely twist your hair into plaits of two strands. Air dry until it’s time to get ready for church the next morning.
Raising Black children, especially Black daughters, in a virulently anti-Black country, is a lot of work, and I give my mother a great deal of credit for instilling me with a sense of pride in my Blackness. Black art and artists from Romare Bearden to Mose T to the quilters of Gee’s Bend adorned our walls. Blackness was never seen as deficient, but rather an abundant well for the artistry of our everyday lives. Taking care of our hair was an extension of that.
Now my mother, an architecture professor at the University of Houston, has taken that pride she instilled in me and shared it with the entire city of Houston. Her exhibit “Hair Salon,” which opened Feb. 2 at the Mashburn Gallery at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design, takes Black hair as an inspiration for whole new forms of art and three-dimensional expression.
My mother had good reason to believe that the world would look down upon me for what my hair looked like. I grew up hearing the story of her summer at Girl Scout camp in southern Alabama, her hair carefully braided into cornrows for the requisite swimming and running about, when her white camp counselor (who couldn’t have been too much older than she was) asked her offhandedly, “Don’t you wish your hair was like mine?” She can still remember wishing she had a good comeback.
As a person of mixed African American and Mexican heritage,
my hair is one of the most visible signifiers of my Blackness. When I was 16, I got my first job working as a sales clerk at a small boutique near my house. At the end of the interview, the manager gestured to my hair, which was in twists, neatly secured by a scarf, and said
“just make sure that’s … neat.”
There are lots of code words that dominant society uses to police Black hair. “Neat.” “Professional.” “Unkempt.” A study at Duke asked participants to rate Black and white female job candidates on professionalism, competence and other factors. Participants gave Black women with natural hair lower scores on both professionalism and competence, and they were not recommended as frequently for interviews as Black women with straightened hair or white women with curly or straight hair.
Why does this matter? It’s not just about expression (though to be clear, the right to express oneself with traditions that are deeply rooted in one’s culture is absolutely a right). It’s material. The hair textures that are common in the African diaspora, with tight coils and relative elasticity, give rise to unique needs. Styles such as braids, twists and locks are necessary to prevent breakage and maintain healthy hair; chemical or heat straighteners can damage hair in the long term.
Enter the CROWN Act — “Creating a Respectful and
Open World for Natural hair” — which extends civil rights equal protection to the realm of hair, explicitly prohibiting discrimination against Black natural hair and protective styles in schools and workplaces.
To date, the CROWN Act or similar legislation has been signed into law in 18 states. At the federal level, it has passed the House but has yet to be taken up by the Senate. It has yet to be even debated in Texas.
I cycled through a number of different styles growing up. I’d usually sport cornrows in the summer, courtesy of a family friend from church who’d come over and braid my hair. In middle and high school, I sometimes flat-ironed my hair, but I never used chemical relaxers: Those were strictly verboten by my mother, who wanted to protect me from the years of breakage she’d endured.
Mainly, the style I came back to again and again, especially in adulthood, was the two-strand twist. It was simple. It was versatile.
Most importantly, either my mother (when I was growing up) or I (when I moved out) could do it ourselves.
My mom didn’t wear her own hair naturally in adulthood — the work it required was hard to balance with her full-time job — but she learned the world of Black natural hair by doing mine.
So when we encountered the work of Nigerian photographer J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, it struck something within her. The late Ojeikere, a documentary photographer, is perhaps best known for his “Hairstyles” series, photographs of Black women’s hair in styles from knots to braids to intricate weavings of locks.
One piece in particular,
“Onile Gogoro Or Akaba” caught my mother’s eye. In it, a Black woman faces away from the camera, gazing slightly downward. Her hair, by contrast, extends toward the sky, locks drawn upward into a cylindrical, basket-like shape. It reminded my mother of the weaving style she’d had her students incorporate into their hanging designs in her thirdyear interior architecture class.
They’d designed a “Libromat,” a combination laundromat and library, for Houston’s Third Ward.
Thus the idea for the “Hair Salon” exhibit was born: What if you took the generative potential of Black hairstyles and sized them up? What if you turned them into architecture?
For the exhibit, contributors from six countries translate braid patterns into all types of artist creations, some drawings, some sculpture, some weaving and some computer code.
How do coding and braiding play together? You take the three-stranded plaits, the knotting and twisting, and convert them into lines of computer code. And from there, they design new materials and try architectural experiments.
Anchoring the exhibition is a pale wooden table 15 feet in diameter. Rather than a unified circle, the table is made of 22 fragments. Coiled copper tubes radiate upward from the tabletop. Each curl represents part of the African diaspora fractured by the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
They’re separate but together, a unified African body. Seeing the coils at this scale — coils which I’ve seen so many times in my life, bouncing across the shoulders of my friends and family — reminds me that each individual curl, each strand, is mighty in its own right.
And together, in the volume that we associate with our hair, they are a potent force.
I’ll be at the exhibit opening both as a fan of Black hair and as a practitioner of its art.
The beauty that my mother passed down to me lives in my hair and in the poetry that I’ve come to call a profession.
I will sing a song of Black hair, of a future with us in it, enough genius grants to go around, a life as abundant as we know our hair to be.
Irene Vázquez is a Black Mexican American poet and journalist, currently based in Hoboken, NJ. Her debut poetry chapbook, “Take Me To the Water,” was released by Bloof Books in October 2022.
The “Hair Salon” exhibit is on view in the Mashburn Gallery at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design, Feb. 2-28.