Join us for a lively conversation between author Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and designer V. Mitch McEwen as Rhodes-Pitts discusses her first book Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America.

For a century Harlem has been celebrated as the capital of black America, a thriving center of cultural achievement and political action. At a crucial moment in Harlem's history, Rhodes-Pitts untangles the myth and meaning of Harlem's legacy. Examining the epic Harlem of official history and the personal Harlem that begins at her front door, the author introduces us to a wide variety of characters, past and present. At the heart of their stories, and her own, is the hope carried over many generations, hope that Harlem would be the ground from which blacks fully entered America's democracy.

This public program is the first in a three-part series, Up/Down, North/South, a collaboration with the Goethe-Institut New York.

This program is FREE. Please RSVP below. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’ articles have appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Boston Globe, Transition, and Vogue. She was born in Texas, educated at Harvard University and has lived in Harlem. She is the winner of a Fulbright Scholarship, a Lannan Foundation fellowship and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Harlem is Nowhere is her first book.

V. Mitch McEwen is an urban designer, curator, unlicensed architect, practicing designer and the Director and Founder of SUPERFRONT. She is a recipient of the The New York State Council on the Arts 2010 Independent Projects awards for Architecture, Planning and Design for her ongoing BLACK SITE project. Her architectural work has been published in Architectural Record and the New York Times, and her writing in African-American studies has been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society (IRAAS, Columbia University, 2007, 2009). After receiving the M. Arch degree from Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning (GSAPP) in 2006, she was invited to join the faculty of GSAPP as Adjunct Assistant Professor to create a new cross-disciplinary course for urban planners and urban designers. Since founding SUPERFRONT in January 2008, she has curated more than a dozen exhibits and published four architectural catalogs, working with artists, historians, and architects from New York, Los Angeles, Venice, Berlin, San Juan, Beijing and elsewhere. She holds an M. Arch from Columbia GSAPP and B.A. from Harvard.

Up/Down, North/South is a series of three public dialogues between multidisciplinary artists and scholars. Organized as part OFF/SITE, a collaboration between The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Goethe-Institut New York, these programs draw on the notion of geography to focus conversations on the role of place on artistic production. The discussions will address both local concerns about the relationship between the urban environment and aesthetics; as well as art-making practices in black European society. Questioning art historical discourses that have emerged in the wake of Communism between “East” and “West,” Up/Down, North/South emphasizes ideas of cultural syncretism and antagonism across European and US contexts.