Sydney Maubert
2023
Design
Homestead, FL
Sydney Rose Maubert is a Miami architect, artist, and professor. She holds post-professional and professional degrees in architecture from Yale (2022) and the University of Miami (2020), with double minors in writing and art. She has received several awards including the Yale Moulton Andros Award (2022), and the University of Miami Alpha Rho Chi Award (2020). She is the founder of Sydney R. Maubert LLC., her art and mural practice.
Her scholarly research interests are architecture, geography, and cultural production in the Caribbean and American South. The work is largely shaped by black studies, gender studies, decolonial studies, history, and cultural geography.
Currently, Sydney Rose is the predoctoral fellow at Cornell's Strauch Fellowship, where she will be teaching and producing research (Fall 2022- ongoing). Her research explores racial-sexual perception in the built environment.
BIO
For the length of my studies and practice, I researched Miami's Black and indigenous geographies as alternative patterns, within and beyond geographies of conquest, and its relationship to architecture. Though there is no shortage of sociological literature demonstrating how racial-sexual myths are rendered spatial, there is little documentation on how the architecture of the slum came into being or the critical examination of its architecture. The research practice rests at the intersection of architecture and sociology, aiming to describe the social upheaval which made Black figures unfit for history and render them as architectural and spatial through storytelling, stitching historical, archival, and fictional narratives together. Historians and Black theorists, such as Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, Tiffany Lethabo King, bell hooks, W. E. B. Du Bois and Hortense Spillers, all suggest ways in which the Black female body is in crisis, at the mercy of spatial differentiation.
STATEMENT
How can we make the outdoors a space of belonging?
My research at the moment is focused on the Black Seminoles and Tequesta histories in the Everglades. My work is interested in identifying appropriative methods of architecture and creating space, through the power of narrative and storytelling. Relegating indigenous narratives to a kind of pre-history has effectively erased not only personhood but entire histories of solidarity and ways of being. I hope that in my time there I can research, perform archival research and play with representation through my mural practice. I think the assertion of murals and tapestries is important because it will assert possible methods of resolving the violence of erasure, by offering new ways of redeeming lost languages. Murals are paramount to my practice because they communicate spaces of care and honor by their scale and appearance.