Walter Hood: Cultural Storytelling Through Design

MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant-winner Walter Hood creates green spaces that resonate with and enrich the lives of residents while also honoring communal histories. As founder and creative director of Oakland-based firm Hood Design Studio, he has transformed a variety of areas—from the redesign of traffic islands, vacant lots, and freeway underpasses that challenge the legacy of neglect of urban neighborhoods to large-scale commemorative landscapes that reflect his firm’s interest in the role of sculpture in public space.

Hood will share projects that approach design through the lens of cultural storytelling and community engagement, including the highly-praised International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina—an impactful landscape that addresses memory, tragedy, and culture while paying homage to the local community and the African diaspora at large. Hood will also share insights into his firm’s upcoming redesign of the landscape surrounding Lincoln Center and Damrosch Park in NYC. This project aims to address the urban barrier created by the center’s construction in the 1960s—a project that displaced much of the San Juan Hill neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side.

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