Everything about Amaza Lee Meredith seemed to defy the conventions of her day.

A native of Lynchburg, Meredith was born in 1895 to a Black mother and a white father who weren’t allowed to marry because of anti-miscegenation laws. Prohibited from entering the architect profession because of “both her race and her sex,” she designed houses nonetheless. Her masterpiece is Azurest South, an International Style architectural treasure on the campus of Virginia State University where she both worked and lived with her partner Edna Meade Colson; their home is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Other major accomplishments include establishing the art department at VSU and co-founding a post-war vacation community for Black middle-class families on Sag Harbor, New York.

While Meredith hasn’t received the renown she deserves for her barrier breaking achievements, lately there’s been an effort underway to change that.

Last November, MIT Press published Jacqueline Taylor’s “Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern: Architecture and the Black American Middle Class.” The book details Meredith’s story while also “revealing the importance of architecture as a force in Black middle-class identity.”

A forthcoming book, edited by singer and songwriter Solange Knowles, is also underway; Architectural Digest reported in February that Knowles’ focus on Meredith is “an obsession,” and that she’s been “combing through the archives of Virginia State University” researching her.

There’s also “Dear Mazie,” a new exhibition that opens tonight at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. The exhibition features commissioned pieces by 11 contemporary artists and architects that celebrate Meredith’s legacy.

“Everything about her coming into the world and existing in the world were against convention,” says ICA curator Amber Esseiva. “She was a lesbian living in this highly modern house in the American South, trying to change the state of education and building an art school because she believed deeply that the arts were at the center of all things that made life enjoyable.”

Esseiva first learned of Meredith while conducting research for “Great Force,” a 2019 ICA exhibition that explored the force of whiteness, the counterforce of Black resistance and the persistence of the color line in America.

For “Dear Mazie,” Esseiva spent years dipping into VSU’s archive, which contains roughly 5,000 pieces of Meredith’s correspondence, blueprints and photos from the 1910s to the 1980s. The exhibition’s name was inspired by Meredith’s prodigious letter-writing.

“She was so many things,” says Esseiva. “She was an architect and a teacher and a queer woman in the South, and an education reformer and an activist. There was so much information and so many strands of activity in her life that I could have pursued, so it took me a while to figure out how to develop something at the ICA.”

The exhibition doesn’t feature any actual archival items; instead, the pieces on display are reproductions and references to her life. As Azurest South was built on the location of a former steel factory, Esseiva had letters and photographs from the archive printed on steel plates for the exhibit.

Upon entering the ICA, visitors will be greeted with a recreation of Azurest South’s carport above the first-floor gallery entrance. The carport is “Azurest blue,” the distinctive color that features prominently in Meredith’s home.

The main room of the exhibit includes floor-to-ceiling mural installations created by artist, activist and educator Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo.

“Lukaza is really thinking about [Meredith’s] intimate relationship with interior space and building homes people,” Esseiva says of the installations. “It takes a portion of an Amaza Lee Meredith painting from 1973 and paints it on the wall. On top of that, Lukaza has developed these special black paper banners that represent blueprints from her archive and letters that she wrote to people describing the feeling that she wants in the houses that she’s making.”

Two works by New York-based sculptor Abigail Lucien include a trellis that was inspired by one Meredith had in the woods behind her home and a life-sized vanity that Lucien imagined belonging to Edna Meade Colson; the latter was inspired by a photograph of Colson’s bedroom titled “My Lover’s Boudoir.”

In the center of the exhibit is a life-sized fiberglass sculpture by Tschabalala Self that’s informed by an image in Meredith’s archive. Esseiva says that Self is “thinking about the Black female body and how it’s used as an object of desire” with the sculpture.

On the windows of the ICA hang wooden frames created by Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga; these frames will be removed from the windows and used to construct a classroom setting at a later date during the exhibition’s run.

One section of “Dear Mazie,” features an installation by The Black School’s Joseph Cuillier and Shani Peters, two educators who are working to create a 21st century schoolhouse that will function as a community center for Black radical arts education in New Orleans.

“It’s a little library and meditation space that takes some design elements from [Meredith’s] home,” says Esseiva of their contribution at the ICA. “They’re opening a Black school just like Amaza did. I wanted to merge the practices of both this collective and Amaza’s work in opening a school.”

The exhibit also features a multimedia video piece by Cauleen Smith that celebrates Meredith’s work in establishing what’s now known as the Black Hamptons in Sag Harbor. The community served as the setting for Pulitzer-winning novelist Colson Whitehead’s 2009 book “Sag Harbor.”

This evening, the ICA will host a premiere event for “Dear Mazie,” and two other new exhibits: “Loie Hollowell: Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years,” and “Caitlin Cherry: Eigengrau.” On Nov. 15, the ICA will hold a panel discussion about Black architecture, featuring architects Mario Gooden, the AD–WO collective, Columbia University architectural historian Mabel O. Wilson, Marland Buckner of the Shockoe Project, and Abigail Lucien.

Esseiva is also working on her own book that will be an extension of the show, including more archival materials and oral histories about Meredith; it will be published in late 2025 or early 2026.

Reflecting on Meredith’s legacy as of the first known Black queer woman to practice as an architect in the United States, Esseiva says the ICA is fortunate to host this exhibit.

“It’s special that it’s happening in Virginia, because with all the sensation around her, this could have happened at a major New York institution, or an institution in another state with more resources,” Esseiva says. “We’re really lucky that an institution in Virginia is the first to tell this story.”

The premiere event for “Dear Mazie,” will take place Friday, Sept. 6, from 6-9 p.m. at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, 601 W. Broad St. Free, but guests are encouraged to RSVP ahead of time. The exhibition will be on display until March 9, 2025. For more information, visit icavcu.org or call 804-828-2823.