Amaza Lee Meredith, Art Professor, Artist, and Designer

The white father of Amaza Lee Meredith (1895 – 1984) was a skilled carpenter who taught his daughter drafting and model-making but discouraged her from pursuing her dream of becoming an architect, probably because he understood the barriers that a Black woman would face. Meredith’s Black mother imparted a faith in education in her daughter, and Meredith excelled in school and pursued a teaching career. Later in life, she did create opportunities to design and alter homes.

In 1912, Meredith attended a summer program at Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute to obtain her primary school teaching certificate. There she met Edna Colson, a college instructor six years older than Meredith who would later become her lifelong companion. Colson, scholar Jacqueline Taylor writes, “was an enthusiastic participant in the politics and practice of racial uplift, and she had a deep influence on Meredith’s career trajectory, guiding her and supporting her with pedagogical literature and advice.”

The early years of the couple’s relationship were largely spent apart. In 1926, Meredith moved in with her sister in Harlem and enrolled in the Columbia University Teacher’s College where she focused on teaching art and art appreciation. She earned her bachelor’s degree in 1930 and her master’s in 1935. She then returned to teach at the institution where she and Colson had met, which had been renamed Virginia State College for Negroes. There Meredith started teaching art. She soon created a Fine Arts Department that she chaired until her retirement. She also coordinated interior color schemes for some of the buildings on campus.

Azurest South (AJ Belongia, 2012, CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED)         

Azurest South (AJ Belongia, 2012, CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED)

For a site next to campus, Meredith designed a house for herself and Colson in 1938. Called “Azurest South,” the five-room home was designed in the International Style with concrete block, stucco, glass block, and a flat roof. Construction was completed in 1939. The nomination form for listing the house on the National Register for Historic Places reads, “Miss Meredith's interior design is characterized by dramatic use of color, vivid patterning of walls, floors and ceilings, and the use of inventive lighting fixtures.” Two years after her death, Azurest South became the official Alumni House for Virginia State University, as Meredith had wished. The house was listed on the National Register for Historic Places in 1993.

In 1939, the same year that construction of Azurest South was completed, Meredith joined her sister Maude Terry in developing a beachfront vacation community in Sag Harbor, New York. Discrimination in lending typically blocked home ownership for Black families, but Terry, Meredith, and two friends started a syndicate to provide financing. They also established bylaws to discourage white encroachment in the community they named Azurest North. Meredith might have designed several of the homes in what grew into a 195-home community by the late 1970s. Images of Meredith’s art and architecture can been found here.

By working within a Black institution and her Black community, Meredith was able to thrive as a designer in spite of the barriers to entering the profession of architecture. Today, nearly four decades after Meredith’s death, there are 593 Black female architects licensed in the US—less than 0.5 percent of the 120,000 total licensed architects. There are about 21.5 million Black women in the US, roughly 6 percent of the population.

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Sources:

Jacqueline Taylor, “Amaza’s Azurest: Modern Architecture and the ‘New Negro’ Woman,” in Suffragette City: Women, Politics and the Built Environment, Eds. Elizabeth Darling, Nathaniel Walker. (New York: Routledge, 2019): 33 – 53.

Calder Loth, Mary Harding Sadler, James Hill, National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form, “Azurest South,” November 5, 1993.

Virginia State University, “Amaza Lee Meredith.”

Sandra E. Garcia, “On Long Island, a Beachfront Haven for Black Families.” New York Times Style Magazine, October 1, 2020.