Monthly Recap :: November 2025

Peace Everyone,

I hope this finds you well. As usual, I’m sharing a few reflections on where my mind’s been, what I’ve been making, and what questions I’ve been asking. As you may have noticed, I missed sending my October update, so I’m combining 2 months into one this time. Enjoy :)

1. What I’ve Been Thinking About

These last two months, I’ve been thinking a lot about interior life with respect to race and culture. Across the things I’ve been reading and watching lately, a subtle pattern has started to emerge: a sense that the most meaningful parts of Black life are not always the most visible ones.

Some of that clarity came while reading Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, where whole emotional worlds unfold beneath the surface of ordinary events. But this perspective gathering process became clearest when I watched a conversation among Black artists and curators about abstraction and what it means to work outside the representational frame (i.e. not putting images of black people in their work).

This conversation resonated with me not because I’m distancing myself from ideas about race, but because I’m wary of being drafted into a monolithic understanding of what Black creative work should represent. I’m realizing that my affinity for abstraction isn’t about avoidance. It’s about wrestling with complexity and depth. It’s about the freedom to communicate nuance without collapsing it into a symbol that people already recognize.

Across literature, art, physics, architecture, and even the spiritual texts I’ve been returning to, the same theme keeps appearing: interior experience is not secondary to identity; it is its own kind of knowledge. So the question I’ve been sitting with is not, “How do I avoid being seen as a Black artist?” but rather:

How do I make work that honors the fullness of my interior world without reducing it to what’s most legible to others?

So, essentially, I’m moving towards a way of working where “Blackness” is neither hidden nor illustrated, but simply present in the rhythms, tensions, and formal decisions that emerge from the inside out.

2. Updates from My Art Practice

As all these reflections have been unfolding, I’ve found myself returning to an old idea with new seriousness: the role of the “citizen architect”.

In an idealized world, this is an architect who understands their work as a civic offering, who moves fluidly between physical space, public life, and the systems that hold communities together. Someone whose practice isn’t confined to buildings, but who still thinks architecturally: in layers, relationships, thresholds, and long-term consequences. What this month has shown me is that my creative and strategic impulses are not separate strands. They are different expressions of the same instinct: to understand how human life, interior experience, and civic infrastructure shape one another.

That realization has pushed me to think about fit — not in terms of job titles or sectors, but in terms of posture. What kinds of environments allow this kind of architectural thinking to matter? Where can vertical integration, systems foresight, and cultural respect actually work together? Where does architecture still have the capacity to operate as a form of public stewardship, not just as a service or a product?

These questions aren’t leading me away from what I’ve been doing; if anything, they’re helping me see the work more clearly. The food systems projects, the strategic advising, the work with institutions — all of it has been part of defining a broader architecture practice, one that includes policy, planning, design, economics, and culture as legitimate materials.

What I’m sensing now is the beginning of an integrated direction: a practice grounded in civic responsibility, informed by interior depth, and capable of operating across multiple scales without losing its center. I don’t know the exact form this will take yet, but I recognize the orientation. And that feels like the beginning of a more coherent chapter in my work.


3. Ongoing Work in My Professional Practice

Parallel to all this interior reflection, I’ve also been interested in the thread of planetary systems, AI, and the accelerating future. Specifically, I’ve been interested in the feeling of the world “tilting without our consent”. Here are some of the signals that point to this feeling:

• the rise of zettascale data centers

• recursive self-improvement in models

• the decoupling of labor and capital

• the long tail of physical tasks becoming automated

• the strange optimism of tech alongside the anxiety of society

• the energy footprint of intelligence

It’s certainly a strange time. However, amid all the uncertainty, I’ve also felt a sense of calm. Because as overwhelming as the future seems, it also reveals the importance of something very simple:

1. having clear lines of inquiry
2. honoring other ways of “knowing”

4. Best Things I’ve Seen Lately

These are a few of the talks, books, and works that opened something in me this month:

• Alma Thomas — Eclipse paintings & color fields
  A reminder that joy can be radical, and the cosmos is available to all of us

• Richard Wright — The Man Who Lived Underground
  A novel that speaks to the psychological weight of interior life

• Less Wrong - Introduction to Game Theory

• Richard Feynman — Six Easy Pieces

• Talks from Eric Schmidt, Dario Amodei, and the “AI 2027” project

5) Priorities In My Holistic Practice Right Now

• Strategic advising for mission-first organizations exploring urban development, sustainable business, and uncertain futures

• Projects that treat art as civic or ecological infrastructure

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

Thanks, as always, for following along. If your own work is circling similar questions, I’d love to be in conversation.

Blessings,

JCM