For Amaza Lee Meredith, design was a process of self-determination. An artist and educator who served as an instrumental champion of arts and design education in her native Virginia, Meredith was also a self-taught architect. Her most distinguished project was her own house, Azurest South, where she lived with her partner, Dr. Edna Meade Colson, for over 40 years. Built of concrete, glass brick, and metal in the International Style, the single-story white building ornamented with teal trim lives on today as alumni housing for Virginia State University, where Meredith founded the school’s art department. A pioneering study in modernism, the home was an expression of her world-building perspective as a Black, queer woman and a testament to the ethic of care she embodied in her life and community.
Last month, on a chilly November evening, a line wrapped around the block outside of New York City’s Surrogate Courthouse for entry to Saint Heron’s launch event for Azurest Blue: The Life and Legacy of Amaza Lee Meredith, a new publication honoring the late architect’s legacy.
For the occasion, the Saint Heron team transformed the elegant Beaux Arts courthouse lobby into a bustling archive and library. The event’s stylish attendees filled out forms to receive their Saint Heron “library card” to check out copies of the zine. Glass vitrines featured selections on art and architecture from Saint Heron’s extensive archive of works by Black and brown poets, artists, and authors. Overhead, on the landing of the grand staircase, experimental pianist Precious Renee Tucker performed surrounded by her signature array of keyboards. Over the course of the evening the artist played five times, with each set timed to be 1,939 seconds apart, a numerical nod to 1939, the year Meredith completed construction of Azurest South.
This poignant reanimation of Meredith’s archive was the result of years of research from Saint Heron founder Solange, who stumbled upon her name while researching Black architects. Further digging revealed frustratingly little information on Meredith that was available to the public. This inspired Solange and the Saint Heron team to reach out to Virginia State University, which houses her extensive archive. Azurest Blue presents fragments drawn from this archive—personal correspondence, scrapbook pages, photographs—alongside essays from Ferren Gibson, Shantel Aurora, Briona Simone Jones, Jerald “Coop” Cooper of Hood Century Modern, and Pascale Sablan, in an expansion of scholarship on Meredith’s illustrious oeuvre. Across the research zine, contributors examine ideas of domesticity, Black private life, and queer, radical love as reflected through Meredith’s precise and exuberantly creative design practice.
Foundational to the cult of the American dream, the act of building and owning a house is traditionally an act of aspiration, fetishized into status-based tropes like a white picket fence or a two-car garage. For Meredith, Azurest North’s distinctive architectural elements were rooted less in aspiration, but rather in the expression of the very values she had structured her life around. In “Archival Aspects of Love-making”, Briona Simone Jones delves into Meredith’s approach to home-making, framing it within Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic “as a process of self-making, learning, doing.” A closer look at Meredith’s blueprints reveals a queered architecture. Take the house’s two bedrooms—designed to be equal in size, Meredith forewent the spatial hierarchies of master and guest bedroom in subversion of the norms that typically dictate how domestic space is divvied up. Then, there’s the small studio Meredith named “My Lady’s Boudoir”, designed as a testament to her love of Dr. Colson, and outfitted expressly for the purpose of Dr. Colson’s rest and recreation.
Sometimes referred to as “Az-u-Rest” in personal correspondence, Meredith’s christening of her home reflects a life-long commitment to cultivating spaces of Black rest. The politicization of rest is an idea that has been much explored by Black feminists, with Lorde describing Black self-care and rest as “an act of political warfare.” However, Meredith’s commitment extended beyond the self. One of her most impactful architectural endeavors was the creation of Azurest North, a vacation community for the Black middle class in Sag Harbor, New York, that she developed with her sister, Maude Terry in 1947 during the Jim Crow era that continues to operate today. The sisters formed a syndicate that allowed generations of Black thinkers, artists, professionals, and doctors to buy plots of beachfront land while avoiding discriminatory mortgage-lending practices, and build their own homes, at least two of which were designed in the modernist style by Meredith. As Cooper notes in his essay, the creation of Azurest North, was “seminal in the history of Black leisure.”
The zine’s analysis of Meredith’s experience navigating discriminatory systems informed by racism, sexism, and homophobia tend to focus on the significance of her achievements against the backdrop of racialized discrimination that continues to pervade today. An essay from architect Pascale Sablan telescopes the historical dearth of Black female architects into the present, reporting from a 2022 study that there are currently less than 600 living Black woman architects in the United States.
In the years since work first began on this zine, Meredith’s legacy has received renewed attention. An exhibition curated for Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute of Contemporary Art by Amber Essiva titled Dear Mazie, commissioned works by eleven contemporary artists, designers, and architects that were based on Meredith’s archive and correspondence. And in 2023, Jacqueline Taylor published Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern, which presented Meredith’s practice against a broader context of Black architecture and the evolution of American modernism—a challenge to the archetype of the white male hero architect. Meredith and her work were the subject of an episode of the podcast New Angle: Voice produced by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. It’s clear that these conversations about Meredith and her legacy is ever-unfolding, and continues to serve as an inspiration to artists, architects, and, as Solange writes in her dedication, “anyone who wants to build a home with their own two hands that lasts forever.”
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