Introducing the BCaT Lab Mural: Black Homeplaces!

Artist in Residence Maïa Walcott led a collaborative mural-making project in the BCaT Lab

COMM Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) Lab Rianna Walcott has been working on the research project “Black Homeplaces” with 32 collaborators since Fall 2024. As part of these collaborative efforts, Professor Walcott’s sister, Maïa Walcott, served as Artist in Residence for the BCaT Lab. Together, they combined Maia’s background in art with her and Rianna’s research and personal interests in homemaking practices across the Black diaspora. 

Maïa Walcott is a multidisciplinary artist, reflecting British-Caribbean culture through sculpture, painting, illustration, and photography. She has a research background in Social Anthropology, researching sound system culture in the UK and the front room’s dual role as both display room for the recreation of Caribbean cultural practices, and community gathering space for recent migrants. Her work centers Black British culture and quotidian Black life, transforming everyday intimacies, cultural rituals, and her family’s genealogy and history of migration into archival record. 

During Maïa’s residency at the University of Maryland, she painted a large (around 20 feet long x 7 feet high) mural in the BCaT Lab (Room 3115 in Skinner). The mural illustrates a living room in a Black home, and incorporates details common to Black homemakers across the diaspora, such as an Adinkra symbol for 'Sankofa’ that would be common in Ghanaian homes, the ubiquitous mahogany display cabinet, bright tropical silk flowers, and glass fish baubles common to Caribbean homes.

Maïa reflected on the creative process behind Black Homeplaces, stating, “The opportunity to paint a large-scale, Black living room—a space that has been at the centre of my ethnographic and creative work for so long—has been incredibly rewarding. I'm really excited about the future of the 'Homeplaces' project and the opportunity to collaborate with Rianna, in fully realising the significance of 'home' within the Black diaspora."

On Wednesday, December 3rd, BCaT hosted an “Art and the Archive” panel featuring Maïa, keondra bills freemyn, and Amber Robles-Gordon. The panel focused on how art encourages worldbuilding, the role of Black art in filling archival silences, and themes of personal vs. collective Black diasporic experience.

From L to R: Rianna Walcott, Maïa Walcott, Amber Robles-Gordon, and keondra bills freemyn

While Maïa painted almost nonstop the first week of December, BCaT also held drop-in sessions that invited collaboration, as people from across campus came and engaged with prompts about what “home” means to them while painting smaller frames to be superimposed later onto the mural. 

Maïa and ARHU Dean Stephanie Shonekan

In addition to being breathtakingly unique and beautiful, the BCaT mural will function as a living archive; campus community members will be able to contribute to it in future semesters during BCaT events. The mural has designated spaces, such as the interchangeable photo frames shown below, to invite continual collaboration on this project and reflect how homes function as living, changing archives. 

The week ended with a hybrid retreat led by Dr. Rianna Walcott with her 32 collaborators, VR engineer consultants, and support from graduate students in the MS GIS program, to finalize outputs from 18 research projects. Next semester, these projects, and a digital version of the mural, will become part of an interactive virtual reality experience of a Black home. 

Rianna explains how rewarding the experience has been for her: “Maïa and I's research and creative work has continually circled themes of identity, world-building and diaspora, and I'm thrilled to have continued that trajectory with my brilliant cohort of collaborators in the BCaT Homeplaces project, who represent and research so many facets of the Black diasporic experience. I'm so thankful for the interest and participation from the wider UMD community—what better way to commemorate the transformation of a 'lab' into a 'home'! Having Maïa, a UMD alumna herself, join us at the BCaT Lab to co-create this mural has been a beautiful full-circle experience, our latest in a long line of collaborations. I certainly couldn't think about home without her.”

Thank you, Rianna and Maïa, for organizing and creating such a wonderful and important mural in the BCaT Lab. We are honored to have it as part of our COMMunity!