Monthly Recap :: April 2025

Peace Everyone,

Hope you’re well. After pausing my monthly emails in March for Ramadan, I’m back with a quick reflection on what’s been moving across my practice. As always, this is a ~2-minute glimpse into the questions, projects, and energies shaping my current direction.

1) What’s Been Moving in My Practice:

The past two months have been deeply clarifying—not because I’ve done more, but because I’ve started to integrate my work more honestly. Each day, I’m drawing closer to my idea of a holistic practice: one where community precedes career, where worship and work inform each other, and where my art, strategy, and writing converge toward a long-view vision.

I designed and led an exhibition on food systems investment across Chicagoland—an opportunity to use architecture as a storytelling tool for ecological and economic futures. I was also invited as a visiting critic for multiple final reviews at IIT’s architecture school, sharpening my voice within the discipline and contributing to a broader design discourse.

Outside of those public moments, I’ve been spending significant time at Hyde Park Art Center—forming relationships, refining my process, and letting space itself act as a kind of collaborator. My material practice has also deepened: print work, sculpture, and textile concepts are forming a vocabulary for what’s next. The Clockwise project continues to be a personal anchor, turning my reflections on time, memory, and the divine into a language of form.

And perhaps most meaningfully, I’ve had the privilege of being in direct conversation with some of the leading voices in land conservation, investment, and regional food infrastructure design across the nation. Those exchanges have helped me sharpen my language around values-based development, agriculture, and the systems that make long-term resilience possible.

2) Moments I Was Proud Of This Month:

• Turning Information Into Interaction – Co-designing the Food Systems Visions of Resilience exhibition allowed me to translate complex policy and investment logic into a spatial and visual language that people could feel, not just read. Watching 250+ people walk through the exhibit in only a few hours was also validating.

• Participating in Disciplinary Discourse – Sitting on architecture reviews reminded me that critique can be a generative tool for evolving one’s practice, not just a moment of evaluation, but of shared ideation.

• Letting Environment Shape Expression – My continued presence at Hyde Park Art Center & other art spaces has shifted how I think about making, not just what I produce, but what kinds of conversations the work initiates.

3) Questions I Returned To This Month:

• What if art wasn’t just a response to systems, but a prototype for them?
  I’ve been thinking about how artistic processes—iterative, speculative, embodied—might inspire/offer models for governance, planning, or even economic structures themselves.

• How do we build cultural infrastructure that supports both divine intent and material survival?
  As I navigate faith and futurity, I’m curious how spaces, rituals, and institutions can serve both spiritual alignment and daily human needs.

• How can futures thinking and investment logic meet—without one erasing the other?
  I’m working across disciplines that often speak past each other; this question helps me test whether long-view imagination and capital planning can coexist meaningfully.

• What’s the role of narrative (or beauty itself) in changing how capital flows?
  In exhibition and strategy, I’m seeing how form, not just fact, can reframe what’s worth funding, building, or preserving.

4) Mind-Expanding Reads from This Month:

📖 Imam W. D. Mohammed: "Born Free of Sin" – A transformative sermon by one of the most influential Muslim thinkers in American history. After guiding the Nation of Islam’s transition to Sunni Islam in the 1970s, he spent decades promoting religious unity, interfaith dialogue, and ethical civic life. In this talk, he draws on both Islamic and Christian scripture to reframe human nature—not as fallen, but as inherently dignified.
📖 Theaster Gates – A brilliant 2015 monograph with an incredible interview in the first few pages by Carol Becker.
📖 Amusing Ourselves to Death – Neil Postman – A sharp critique of how media shapes meaning, reminding me what’s lost when depth gives way to spectacle.
📖 Lean Impact – Ann Mei Chang – An essential read on how innovation methods from tech can serve mission-driven work—without losing sight of values or humility.
🎙️ Brian Eno – A wide-ranging interview on aesthetics, imperfection, and trusting the non-linear unfolding of creative work.
🎙️ Eric Clapton Guitar Solo – Needs no explanation. Just your ears.

5) Priorities in My Practice for Next Month:

• Projects that treat art as civic or ecological infrastructure

• Collaborations at the intersection of land, design, and long-term investment

• Fabrication partners who view materials as theory, not just output

• Publishing or curatorial partners exploring alternative formats and frequencies

Thanks again for your attention, and if any of this resonates, the most helpful thing you can do for me is to share it with a friend. 🙂 ‘Til next time.

Blessings,

JCM