Danny Giles and Sharmyn Cruz Rivera discuss Josephine’s, a multi-year research project on the Josephine Baker House (1927), its modernist architect Adolf Loos (1870–1933), and the iconic entertainer Josephine Baker (1906–1975), who served as inspiration for its design. Supported by a 2022 Graham Foundation research grant, the project has evolved from a close study of the house into an exploration of the cultural milieu in which it was conceived. Josephine’s draws on archival research at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the collection of the Albertina Museum, Vienna, along with site visits to the Paris location for which the house was designed; Baker’s Château des Milandes in southwestern France; and houses designed by Loos in Paris and Prague.

In this talk, Giles and Cruz Rivera consider the unbuilt Baker House, often regarded as an example of Loos’s modernist vision of architectural purity and his concept of the Raumplan, though less often discussed as an exercise in celebrity, as Loos leveraged Baker’s identity to raise his own profile. In their reading, the design concept for the house can ultimately be understood as a reflection of the workings of the modernist unconscious. Here, they contextualize their findings through a discussion of modernist ideologies, racial fantasy, and visibility, and also present Josephine’s: Prelude, a handmade artist book of images and writing reflecting on this research, produced to accompany an exhibition at terminal in Amsterdam earlier this year.

Daniel Giles is a Black American artist and educator based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His interdisciplinary artistic practice uses methods of appropriation and abstraction to question how power functions within representational systems. Giles’ work takes shape through studio practice as well as collaborative, research-based, and performative approaches, resulting in artworks, publications, and forms of pedagogy. Giles earned an MFA from Northwestern University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently the Course Director of the Piet Zwart Institute Master of Fine Art in Rotterdam.

Sharmyn Cruz Rivera is a Puerto Rican curator and writer based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her curatorial practice seeks to expand the boundaries of exhibition-making to make way for emerging formats of interdisciplinary collaboration, presentation, and dialogue. Cruz Rivera holds an MA in arts administration and policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a dual BA in art history and modern languages from the University of Puerto Rico. She currently serves as Coordinator of Theory of Art, Design and Culture at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam.


Image: Daniel Giles, Untitled (Le Tumulte Blanc), 2026. Courtesy the artist