Dear Mazie Book Launch with Amber Esseiva, Sherese Francis, Mario Gooden, and Jasmine Weber

Join us to celebrate the launch of Dear Mazie,: Sanctuary, Speculation, and Sky, with performances by Mario Gooden and Sherese Francis, as well as a conversation between Gooden, publication editor Amber Esseiva, and Jasmine Weber.

Dear Mazie,: Sanctuary, Speculation, and Sky is an experimental reader that explores the life, work, and legacy of Amaza Lee Meredith (1895–1984), a trailblazing artist and educator who became the first known Black queer woman to practice as an architect in the United States. The publication plots Meredith’s life and work within themes of placemaking, gender, sexuality, and Black love, with a special focus on the ways she built sanctuaries (from homes to institutions to communities) for herself and other people of color to foster rigorous artistic pursuit, free of persecution.

Mario Gooden will present a version of his work “Made in America: There is No Such Thing as African American Architecture,” contending with the practices of “African-American architecture,” historically and in the present. Gooden and publication editor Amber Esseiva will discuss Amaza Lee Meredith’s life, practice, and the reverberations of her legacy in contemporary practice. The evening will conclude with a performance by Sherese Francis, offering an experimental ritual reading and sonic poetic performance drawing from the publication and an expanded world of references.

Amber Esseiva is a Swiss-Senegalese-American curator and educator specialized in producing contemporary art exhibitions and programs by national and international mid-career and emerging artists. Esseiva is currently the Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA VCU). Esseiva is also the Curator-at-Large for The Studio Museum Harlem.

Sherese Francis (she/they) describes themselves as an AlKyMist of the I-Magination, finding expression through poetry, interdisciplinary arts (collage, book and paper arts, sound and performance art), workshop facilitation, editing, and literary curation. Her(e) work takes inspiration from her(e) Afro-Caribbean heritage (Barbados and Dominica), and studies in Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts, mythology, and etymology. Sherese is the author of four chapbooks, editor of the anthology/guided journal Baby Suggs and a Purple Butterfly, and their writing appears in various journals and magazines, including Women’s Studies Quarterly, Furious Flower, and Obsidian. In 2024, Sherese won Inverted Syntax’s Aggrey Book Prize for Poetry for PollyNation: A Seminary of Self, which will be published in the fall 2026. Sherese has had work featured and performed in various exhibitions and showcases, including New York Live Arts, Queens Public Library, York College Arts Gallery, King Manor Museum, Works on Water, Flushing Town Hall, Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, LMCC's The Arts Center at Governors Island, Flux Factory, The Loomis Chaffee School Mercy Gallery, and Ely Center for Contemporary Art.

Mario Gooden is a cultural practice architect and director of Mario Gooden Studio: Architecture + Design. His practice engages the cultural landscape and the intersectionality of architecture, race, gender, sexuality, and technology. His work crosses the thresholds between the design of architecture and the built environment, writing, research, and performance.

Gooden’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including the International Exhibition of Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy; Architekturmuseum der TU Mūnchen; Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam (formerly the Netherlands Architecture Institute); Bauhaus Museum Weimar / Bauhaus-Universität Weimar; the American Academy in Rome; Storefront for Art and Architecture; the National Building Museum in Washington, DC; and the Municipal Arts Society in New York. His work has also been featured in journals and publications including ARTFORUM International, Architect Magazine, Architectural Record, Metropolis, Wallpaper, Architecture & Urbanism (A+U), PIN-UP Magazine, and The New York Times. Gooden’s multi-media installation work entitled The Refusal of Space was featured in the Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (2021). Gooden’s three-channel video installation Black Holes Ain’t So Black was exhibited during Les Journées Nationales de l’Architecture, “Architectures du quotidien” at L’AiR Arts Atelier 11 in Paris (2025) presented as part of the 150th anniversary celebrations of Atelier 11. Gooden’s performance of Black Hole’s Ain’t So Black had its world premiere in April 2026 at the EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Corpus Festival in Troy, New York.

From 2022–2025 Gooden was the Director of the Master of Architecture program at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) of Columbia University where he is also the co-director of the Global Africa Lab (GAL) and a Faculty Affiliate in the African American and African Diasporic Studies Department. Gooden is a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, a 2019 recipient of a National Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture, the 2024 William A. Bernoudy Architect in Residence American Academy in Rome, and a 2025 Artist in Residence at Atelier 11, Cité Cité Falguière, Paris France. Gooden is the recipient of a 2025 Graham Foundation production grant for his performance work Black Holes Ain’t So Black along with choreographer Jonathan Gonzàlez and film-maker Thuto Somo. Gooden is the author of Dark Space: Architecture Representation Black Identity (Columbia University Press, 2016) as well as numerous essays and articles on architecture, art, and cultural production. Gooden is also a Senior Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg (South Africa) and a founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective. Gooden served as the 63rd President of the Architectural League of New York from 2022-2025.

Jasmine Weber is a writer, editor, and artist from Long Island living in Brooklyn, New York. Her criticism and essays have appeared and are forthcoming in publications including Hyperallergic, Seen Journal, Essence Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. She is a recipient of the 2021 Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism and the 2024 Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in Short-Form Writing. Her work has also been supported by the Storyknife Writers Retreat, the Center for Book Arts, McCormack Writing Center, and Triple Canopy.