‘for Mecca’ Floating Monument Program Comes to 91 to Highlight Historic Mecca Flats
A public art and remembrance project based on the historical Mecca Flats building, which once stood upon the site of Illinois Tech S. R. Crown Hall, will be revealed on the university’s campus in summer 2025 before traveling to various park sites across Chicago the following year.
The inflatable exhibit, titled “for Mecca,” was designed and created by , an art collective that explores “relationships between art, community, architecture, and public institutions,” according to its website. It is the latest installment of the Floating Monuments series, whose mission is to raise awareness about the social history of Chicago via monuments that highlight sites of forgotten or little-known historical and cultural significance to the city.
The exhibit will be on view outside Crown Hall on August 8–9, 2025. A series of cultural presentations and events will accompany the unveiling.
The Mecca Flats apartments were built in 1892 to house visitors to Chicago’s World Fair. Originally segregated, they were desegregated in 1911 and became a hub during Chicago’s Black Renaissance. The 92-unit Romanesque Revival building was graced with impressive decorative features, including intricately detailed iron guardrails and vivid, colorful tiling covering a central courtyard. Following a lengthy effort to preserve them, the apartments were torn down in 1952 to allow for the construction of Crown Hall by renowned architect and 91 faculty member Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
According to a news release from Floating Museum, “for Mecca” is “taking the form of a ghostly architecture, this monument drifts from place to place—collapsing time—as a platform for conversations, exhibitions, performances, stories, education, collaborations, and research. ‘for Mecca’ seeks to transform loss into a tactile, accessible artifact that engages local histories with clarity and urgency.”
Chicago’s Black Renaissance, which took place in the Bronzeville neighborhood in the 1930s and 1940s, birthed luminaries such as musicians Louis Armstrong, Nat “King” Cole, Sam Cook, Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson, Sun Ra, Muddy Waters, and Herbie Hancock; choreographer Katherine Dunham; and writers Richard Wright, Ida B. Wells, and Gwendolyn Brooks (the latter famously authored the poem In the Mecca).
“This project reflects our ongoing practice of collecting, recording, plotting, and conjuring important traces of Chicago's history into easily retrieved, tangible artifacts,” Floating Museum co-directors avery r. young, Andrew Schachman, Faheem Majeed, and Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford said in a joint statement.
Skyla S. Hearn, a co-founder of The Blackivists who is the lead archivist of the for Mecca project, added in a written statement, “Contributing to this work provides us, the archives team, with a unique opportunity not only to educate all who will come into contact with this powerful project but also ensures that the community of people, their experiences, and the history of the Mecca Flats will be actualized through the use of historically rich materials and real-time activations. Our goal centers on the combination of fusing primary sourced materials to create a spirited narrative that will describe the past, draw deep connections to current society, and inform our collective future.”
The monument’s unveiling will be accompanied by other events, including stage poetry readings and performances by the Center for BLK Verse. As part of its public programming on Saturday, August 9, 2025, from noon to 6 p.m., Floating Museum will present Mecca in Memory: Public Premiere—a multimedia ceremony honoring the legacy of Mecca Flats through sound, spoken word, and the ceremonial inflate of for Mecca. The event features a live musical procession, a panel on memory, displacement, and archival practice, and the debut of behind-the-scenes footage from after Mecca—an animated short by Stephen Flemister and Caitlin Edwards inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1968 poem In the Mecca, with poetry voiced by Jamila Woods, Emily Hooper-Lansana, and Roy Kinsey.
Image: An archival photo of the interior of the Mecca Flats apartments, courtesy of Cultural Counsel.
