Society’s Cage is a timely interpretive public travelling installation, and a grassroots initiative by a Black-led team of designers, born in the aftermath of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor murders as our society reckons with institutional racism.

A process-driven design anchored in research and facts focusing on lynching, police terrorism, mass incarceration, and capital punishment, the data informed the pavilion’s aesthetics: A “perfect” cube—15 by 15 feet—emerging from 484 steel bars, hung from a canopy, and varying in length to reveal an interior void. An accompanying 8 minute and 46 second commissioned soundscape, corresponds to the data.

This project has been longlisted in the installation design category of Dezeen Awards 2021.

Designer: Dayton Schroeter and Julian Arrington, SmithGroup
Project: Society's Cage