In 1953, while a patient at Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Welfare Island, the Afro-Puerto Rican Spanish language poet and journalist, Julia de Burgos (1914-1953) composed two poems in English. Romero’s project builds from the poet’s insistence, at the end of her life, on this place - a repetition, an imperative “it has to be from here.” What can the archives of Black nurses working on this NY island, their letters, as graphic artifacts, tell us about the changing conditions of moving with and through hospital design - angles of light and ventilation, water vistas, amid an emplotted anti-Black world? Goldwater Memorial Hospital was designed by Isadore Rosenfeld (1894-1980), a hospital architect and consultant who designed many of the hospitals in Puerto Rico, public health sites integral to coloniality’s logics of mass sterilization and the industrial conversion of life to cheap extracted labor. In this talk Romero scaffolds planning documents and
drawings with the archives and imaginations of artists like Ilya Bolotowsky (1907-1981), who was, as seen in the image above, making a rare site specific WPA abstract mural work, or perhaps repair, the plots of public health.

About the speaker: Dr. Mercy Romero is an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Society in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine.

About the image: Elevation for Murals (1940) Day Room B-11, rst oor, Ward B. Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York.