Amaza Lee Meredith

Amaza Lee Meredith (b. 1895–d. 1984) was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, to an African American mother and a white father, a craftsman and builder. Samuel Meredith taught his daughter the art of drawing blueprints and creating architectural models out of cardboard. He adamantly refused to endorse her desire to enter the architectural profession however, knowing the obstacles it would present a Black person, particularly a Black woman. Instead, Meredith conformed to the social expectations of her time, and pursued a teaching career. A segregated southern education system forced Meredith to join thousands of others in the Great Migration north, to gain the necessary credentials to teach at the higher education level. She studied at Columbia University Teachers College under a radical new arts curriculum designed by proto-modernist Arthur Wesley Dow, receiving a B.S. in studio art and art appreciation, then in 1935 an M.S. in art education. Meredith’s arrival in New York’s Harlem, in the late 1920s, coincided with a blossoming of “New Negro” ideation, which asserted an intellectual, accomplished, and politically active Black identity with a strong tradition in the arts, newly expressed in the Harlem Renaissance cultural movement. Although the crucible of this Black mecca helped form Meredith’s modern creative persona, she is not identified in the literature exploring the Harlem Renaissance, nor does she appear in works dedicated to the New Negro movement. On reestablishing herself in Petersburg, as a professional with an M.S. in Art Education, she created a department in 1935 dedicated to arts instruction at Virginia State College (now University), and in doing so she transformed traditional approaches to art education through disseminating Dow’s principles—which both identified art praxis as a design discipline rooted in Japanese methods, and considered African art on an equal footing. In 1939, Meredith designed a home in the International Style for herself and her partner, fellow educator Edna Meade Colson. With its new materials, forms, and modernist aesthetics, as well as its concern for efficiency and economics, the house signaled a radical departure from the traditional colonial revival, typical on the college campus, and inserted modern avant-garde ideas into the landscape. The house also expressed what might be seen as a feminist sensibility with its bold new design choices, combining work and living spaces, and equal-sized bedrooms. Despite society’s misogynistic and discriminatory practices, Meredith demonstrated self-assured ways of living for women, and specifically Black women, in the modern era. Although little recognized or understood in her lifetime, Meredith’s modern house was highly significant as one of the first of its kind in the United States and was recognized as such when it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1993. In addition to this significant building, Meredith established, with her sister Maude Terry, a resort for African Americans on Long Island’s Sag Harbor. The partition of land into manageable and affordable lots, the construction of sewage systems and roads, and the naming of these after family and friends, suggest a determination to establish Black sovereignty in a world that consistently exercised control over their lives. For the resort, known as Azurest North, Meredith also produced a large number of designs for potential summer homes for her friends and family. While few were built, except for the first house for herself and her sister’s family, and another for a friend, the endeavor establishes Meredith further as a Black female avatar of modern design and development.