Cornrow Cartography

Exhibition Design, Generative Coding

Also see California African American Museum

Cornrow Cartography is a research-driven exhibition and archive developed for the Ancestral Tech Archive at the California African American Museum.

The project reframes cornrows as a form of navigational and cultural technology — positioning braiding practices as systems of mapping, memory, and transmission.

Exhibition & Installation

The exhibition translates this research into an immersive spatial experience. Through installation, typography, and material exploration, Cornrow Cartography asks:

How can ancestral technologies guide how we navigate the present and future?

Visitors encounter cornrows not only as aesthetic tradition, but as encoded systems of knowledge — structures that organize movement, geography, and identity.

Archive Development

The Ancestral Tech Archive expanded the museum’s framework by situating cornrows within a broader lineage of cultural technologies.

From this research emerged a typographic system inspired by braided structures — text that bends, expands, and weaves, mimicking the logic of cornrow patterns while extending beyond them.

Generative Typography

Using p5.js

To further explore cornrows as abstract mapping systems, I developed a generative typography tool using p5.js.

The Cornrow Cartography Generator allows users to construct digital braid patterns that function as speculative maps — interactive compositions that translate cultural form into coded structure.

Through this process, hair becomes both archive and interface.

p5.js Process

This project expanded my practice beyond traditional 2D design into spatial and computational media.

Working with p5.js and Processing, I developed custom code that enabled users to generate their own cartographic braid systems — merging research, design, and interaction.

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