Hood Century / Jerald Cooper

Jerald Cooper’s Hood Century reframes Black vernacular architecture as a living archive of design, memory, and social rhythm. Beginning as the Instagram account @hoodmidcenturymodern, Cooper’s platform has grown into a movement of aesthetic recognition and cultural preservation. Drawing from historic and current Black American neighborhoods, Hood Century examines how Black communities shape, preserve, and reinterpret mid-century design. It defines Black modernism as a spatial logic, one that is inherited, modified, or radically reinterpreted through the particulars and variants of Black American life. Using pop-cultural juxtaposition and sensory engagement, Hood Century shifts perception: making the overlooked visible and the local monumental. Preservation becomes participatory and embodied, an act of care that merges personal memory with civic vision.

Jerald “Coop” Cooper was born in 1983 in Cincinnati. Coop is an artist, designer, and the founder of Hood Century (@hoodmidcenturymodern), a new media agency researching, documenting, and educating the masses on African American legacies within modern architecture, design, and “the city.” Through Hood Century and his own multidisciplinary practice, Coop explores the relationship between the Black lived experience and modernity as something “by design.” Centering the Ghanaian tradition of Sankofa—meaning to gather, protect, and renew what is at risk of being left behind—Coop documents and proliferates the history of Black modernism through multimedia platforms and educational programming.