Hello, LA!

It’s culture writer Carolina A. Miranda, and this week I have a dispatch from contributor Leigh-Ann Jackson about groundbreaking Modernist designer Amaza Lee Meredith.

But before I get to that, I wanted to talk about the experience of having my socks knocked the hell off at the movies. The Secret Agent, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and starring Wagner Moura, has been generating buzz for the restrained performance of its leading man and its brilliant cast of singular characters. I was enthralled by its somewhat unclassifiable nature: a 1970s-style New Wave-ish thriller/corrupt cop caper hilariously studded with flashes of the Latin American surreal.

The story is set in 1977, in dictatorship-era Brazil — an authoritarian landscape that bursts with corruption, as well as carnival celebrations. To give away much more is to give away the turns this enthralling picture takes. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to critic John Powers’ review on Fresh Air. 

The Secret Agent is currenting screening in cinemas around LA. Plus, The New York Times has a great profile of Moura, a performer who knows what it means to be on the wrong side of a wannabe authoritarian.

Now, onto the main event, with detours into…

• Marking the anniversary of LA’s fires
• The state of NEA and NEH funding
• Beeple

Keep scrolling!

At top, a still from The Secret Agent, starring Wagner Moura. (Neon)

MODERN TIMES
by Leigh-Ann Jackson

Abigal Lucien's sculpture, For Companion's Sake, 2024, in Dear Mazie at CAAM. (Elon Schoenholz)

Imagine the gumption required to take a stab at becoming an architect in your mid-40s, in order to design a dream home for you and the love of your life. Now, imagine successfully achieving this goal as a queer Black woman in 1930s Virginia.

That’s just one chapter of the largely overlooked story of artist, educator and designer Amaza Lee Meredith. Though she lacked formal training and wasn’t a licensed architect, Meredith broke the race and gender norms of her time to become one of the first Black women to practice the profession in Virginia. Even now, Black women architects make up only 1% of the field, according to a 2024 report by the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards. That bleak stat makes Meredith’s achievements in the Jim Crow-era South even more unfathomable.

If, like me, you’ve been clueless about her until now, there’s an exhibition at the California African American Museum (CAAM) offering a crash course on this risk-taking, rule-breaking trailblazer. Dear Mazie, a traveling show organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU), delivers a somewhat skeletal primer comprised of a biographical timeline, blueprint drawings, reprints of black and white personal photos, typewritten correspondence, laudatory local news clippings, and a few of Meredith’s own paintings. Filling out the show are works by contemporary artists, such as a sculpture by Tschabalala Self and a multimedia video installation by filmmaker Cauleen Smith, who drew inspiration from themes such as “placemaking, gender, sexuality, and Black love.”

Amaza Lee Meredith. (Courtesy of ICA at VCU)

Born in 1895 in Lynchburg, “Mazie” learned the basics of the trade from her carpenter father, Samuel Meredith. Shattering societal conventions came naturally to Amaza, as she grew up with parents whose marriage was then illegal in their home state: her mother was Black and her father was white.

Before picking up the blueprint paper, her initial focus was on the visual arts. With two Columbia University degrees under her belt, Meredith taught art appreciation and studio art at the HBCU now known as Virginia State University (VSU), and is credited with founding the school’s art department. VSU is also where she first met Dr. Edna Meade Colson, the pedagogy professor who would become her life partner. 

The pair’s campus-adjacent love nest — a five-room, single-story building dubbed Azurest South — was Meredith’s first architectural feat. A wall near the entrance of the CAAM exhibition is covered in a mural resembling the building’s exterior, with its signature glass bricks and turquoise trim, giving the sense that you’re stepping into the women’s abode.

 
An installation view of Dear Mazie features a sculpture by Tschabalala Self (in the foreground), as well as wall vinyls that depict elements of the home the designer created for herself. (Elon Schoenholz)

Completed in 1939, the white concrete house was designed in the modern International Style, flipping the script on the traditional Colonial style that was then typical in Virginia. The couple spent over four decades living in the house, using it as a place to unwind, host gatherings, and dive into creative pursuits, such as Meredith’s painting, photography, and interior design projects.

But the house was more than just a home; it was an important signifier. In the 2023 biography, Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern (a scholarly text that informed portions of the exhibition), author Jacqueline Taylor notes:

“Her accomplishment in designing and building a highly modern house for herself and her lover sets her apart as a woman who used architecture not only to gain security but to identify personality, one that was too risky to advertise in such bold and clear physical terms.”

In 1947, Meredith and her sister, Maude Terry, bought a 20-acre piece of land in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and collaborated on Azurest North, a venture that helped establish an enduring beach community for vacationing Black middle-class families who would’ve otherwise faced discriminatory real estate restrictions. The subdivision has maintained its historical significance over the decades and was the setting for Colson Whitehead’s 2009 bougie Black coming-of-age bestseller, Sag Harbor. (You can hear more about the sisters’ culture-shifting enclave on Amaza Lee Meredith: Love and Home, an episode of the New Angle: Voice podcast.)

Others have also been spreading the Meredith gospel in recent years. In 2024, Azurest South was listed as a National Historic Landmark, plus the VSU Alumni Association received a grant from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (with support from the Getty Foundation) to support the building’s restoration. And last November, Solange Knowles debuted Azurest Blue, a 69-page research journal filled with archival photos and essays honoring Meredith, as part of her Saint Heron Community Library project.

Kapwani Kiwanga, Register, 2025, on view in Dear Mazie at CAAM. (Elon Schoenholz)

After the presentation at CAAM, Dear Mazie will go on view at The Church in Sag Harbor, just a few miles from Meredith's cottage, says the show’s curator, Amber Esseiva of ICA at VCU. “Ultimately, the more people who share her story — and, most importantly, incorporate her life and ways of working into contemporary practices of art and design — the more we are able to sustain and extend her legacy.”

Learning about Meredith and her boundary-breaking DIY credo has made me hungry for more. Now, I want to see mainstream recognition afforded to other Black architectural badasses, including Meredith’s contemporary Ethel Furman, and their Massachusetts-based predecessor Elizabeth Carter Brooks.

AROUND THE INTERNET 

• Alissa Walker has a terrific meditation on LA one year after the fires — and all that has (and hasn’t) come of it.
• Plus, Patrick Sisson reports on home design and construction techniques intended to make LA’s burn zones more resilient.
• Salvadoran mail artist Jesús Romeo Galdámez Escobar, who once survived a kidnapping, has died.
• The Washington National Opera is leaving the Kennedy Center.
• Qoommittee, a national network of drag performers and organizers, has launched a petition calling on Kennedy Center donors to stop funding the venue.
• Congress has unveiled a bipartisan funding budget that includes monies for the NEA and the NEH. It has been passed by the House and now moves to the Senate.
• Amid cuts to the humanities, elite universities are suspending or reducing art history graduate admissions.
• Trump’s ballroom, however, is moving ahead.
• Trump withdrew the US government from a slew of international bodies, including many cultural organizations.
• Seen those “We Buy Souls!” posters around LA? Paula Mejía has the story behind them.
• Mat Gleason is not having LACMA’s Beeple installation.
• Just some gorgeous photos of resplendent home libraries.
• Signing off with the hacktivist who deleted white supremacist websites live on stage.

Thank you and see you next week!

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