Stuckeman professor’s fellowship work curated for exhibition

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — An ongoing project called the “Dreadlock Series” by Felecia Davis, associate professor of architecture in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School at Penn State, will be featured in an exhibition curated by Lola Ben Alon, assistant professor of architecture at Columbia University, at the Center for Craft in Asheville, North Carolina, in October.

A new piece for the “Dreadlock Series” that will be part of the exhibit was developed during Davis’s artist residency at MacDowell, a retreat in New Hampshire, in the early summer of 2025. Davis received the 2025 Barbara and Thomas Putnam Honorary Fellowship, which was established by the Putnam family for artists who work in the Rosamund and David Putnam Studio at MacDowell, to support her residency.

MacDowell was founded to offer artists a studio or place to work individually without interruption during the day and a later dinner for gathering and sharing ideas. These artist residencies were the first offered in the United States.

“When you arrive at MacDowell you feel the presence of those artists, scholars, writers and composers who were there before you such as James Baldwin, artists Carrie Mae Weems and Faith Ringgold and writer Audre Lorde,” said Davis, who is also the director of the Computational Textiles Lab (SOFTLAB) in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing. “The significance is the time offered for focused work and the friends and colleagues one meets.”

The fellowship is one of the few residences available to architects and architecture scholars. Davis said she found this environment extremely encouraging and enriching.

The “Dreadlock Series” is a collection of fiber-based structures that uses Black hair as a material with poetic, political, social and scientific dimensions. These structures are architectural models that include flat diagrid woven hair panels and woven hair domes. According to Davis, the intention is to prompt questions about how hair becomes a global commodity and a luxury good; what that process is; and who is involved.

“The hair for the current prototypes was sourced from commercial sellers on Amazon. Many people go online and, like me, do not know where the hair comes from — it is an opaque system,” Davis said. “However, because of this project, I learned about how hair is procured and that it is often from exploited people. Most sellers are not transparent about where their supply comes from, making it difficult to obtain ethically sourced hair at scale. The larger sculpture I am planning will most likely be plant-based fiber such as coconut fibers or dreadlocked wool that historically operated as a trope for Black hair.”

In addition, Davis said, the project points to the responsibilities of working with human biomaterial, especially with acknowledgement and understanding of the genetic link to ancestors. Within these contexts and the complexities they contain, Davis is exploring the possibilities of hair as a biofibers to make sustainable architecture. She combines the aesthetics of Black and African hair styling and structural design to create a synthetic knitted and knotted material, which could be used in tension — as seen in tents — or in compression with the addition of bioresins or other polymers. The series also incorporates knitted and felted wool, which Davis uses to navigate the relationship and social histories between wool and Black hair as materials.

“The project offers designers a way to see the interdependence between culture and nature,” Davis said. “To answer the variety of questions posed by this work, I will need to use methods from various disciplinary arenas.”

The work illustrates many things at once, Davis said: an imaginary space for architectural designers that enables them to engage with the offerings of African and African American hair cultures that honor African and African American existence; to understand the contexts of procuring hair, wool and their commercialization; to synthesize new designs using computational methods and techniques; and to employ scientific understanding of how designers can use wool and hair as bio fibers for designing sustainable buildings.

Davis joined Penn State in August 2014 and established the SOFTLAB as a space for students, faculty and staff to explore textile fabrication tools to create computational methods, frameworks and designs for yarns and fabrics.

In SOFTLAB, researchers use computational textiles, which are textiles that respond to their environment. These responses can be used by designers to communicate information to people.

“The goal of the lab is to question how we live and reimagine how we might use textiles in our daily lives and in architecture,” Davis said. “Our work in the lab is to reexamine the role of textiles in building and how that impacts architecture.”