The exhibition We Gotta Get Back to the Crib features the inaugural collection of sculptural furniture works originally conceived by designers Michael Bennett and the late Imhotep Blot of Studio Kër. Each of these works—designed in joyous opposition to the dominance of Western domestic typologies—offer a reflection on place and community by establishing a nuanced dialogue around historically Black cultural motifs and object-histories.

We Gotta Get Back to the Crib is an appeal to return to Black agency and pay homage to the origins of Black craft and design. Studio Kër’s work reimagines forms such as the Dining Table, the Church Pew, and the Monobloc Chair, all of which reflect the physical tenets of communal gathering that shaped Bennett’s upbringing and the stories of larger cultural experience they express.

We Gotta Get Back to the Crib is the first design intervention to inhabit Rebuild’s newest creative project at the 6 Flat, a formerly vacant property that will become artist residences when the shuttered St. Laurence Elementary School reopens as an arts and creative entrepreneurship incubator. 

Imbued throughout Bennett’s We Gotta Get Back to the Crib is an insistence on grace—on the unerring journey toward a future that, while unfixed in its destination, offers an emphatic invitation to rejoice in the power of each other’s company; of our stories and the seat we take to carry them forward.