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Two women in the Division of Welfare Office across from the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project
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John M. Olin Library, Ginkgo Reading Room

“Our Only Hope”: Black Women and the 1969 Rent Strike Reception and Curator Talk

Join us for the “Our Only Hope”: Black Women and the 1969 Rent Strike exhibition reception and curator talk with Candace Borders, guest curator featured as a part of the community curator program.

Free and open to all, registration requested.

Professional photo of Candace Borders.

Candace Borders is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. She received a B.A. in American Culture Studies from Washington University in 2017 where she was an Ervin Scholar and Mellon Mays Fellow. Her research considers how African-American women experience and theorize their lives at the nexus of race, gender, sexuality, and the state.

Borders’s dissertation, entitled “Remaking Place: Black Women and a Politics of Refusal in St. Louis,” tells an interdisciplinary history of Black women’s quotidian and large-scale public housing activism. As an arts educator and curator, she has worked at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in various roles. You can find her published writing on the public housing rent strike of 1969 in the edited volume In the Daylight of Our Existence: Essays on Architecture, Gender, and Theory, forthcoming from gta Verlag Zürich in Fall 2024.

Upcoming Exhibitions
A photo of the Jubilee Housing from the Washington University Archives.
Exhibition

“Our Only Hope”: Black Women and the 1969 Rent Strike

This exhibition tells the story of the Black women-led rent strike that reshaped the landscape of urban public housing.

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