The true mythology of Samuel Mockbee: 25 years after his death, group renews effort to create a home for the architect’s work ...Middle East

Twenty five years since prolific architect Sambo Mockbee’s death, his rarely seen archive may soon have a permanent home. 

Mockbee died in 2001 at the age of 57. He was at the height of his productivity. This anniversary has renewed efforts to house more than 400 original artifacts, including drawings, architectural models, paintings and personal journals – many never before publicly exhibited – that illuminate his lifelong creative project. 

The initiative, titled “Better Together: Samuel Mockbee’s Dream for the American Future,” features the family’s private collection of Mockbee’s work. 

Samuel Mockbee in 2000 seated in front of his painting “Children of Eutaw Pose Before Their Ancient Cabins” at Ann Bailey’s Barn, Rural Studio, Newbern, Alabama. Credit: Tim Hursley

“Better Together” is championed by the family and a network of curators, scholars and friends. It is further spurred by a three-headed hound of volunteer energy: Samuel Mockbee’s daughter Carol Mockbee, architect and Rural Studio graduate Jennifer Bonner and urban strategist and entrepreneur Josh McManus. 

“We’ve been working on his archives for 20 years,” said Carol. “One of my father’s classic lines was ‘You’ve got to leave them wanting more.’ And he did. He exited and he left everybody wanting more.”

In addition to being one of America’s inimitable architectural voices – the only architect to receive both a MacArthur “genius grant” and an AIA gold medal – the Meridian-born Mockbee was a painter, poet and evangelist for his region. As a creator rooted in process and context, it is not surprising that the full depth of his oeuvre can only be understood through the places that defined him, realized through his collection of writings, sketches, paintings and three-dimensional objects. 

Some of these treasures are directly tied to completed buildings, such as models of the Barton House and the Cook House, two master works designed by Mockbee and his architectural partner Coleman Coker, and made from materials such as concrete block and corrugated metal. These projects furthered their goal of using “conventional materials in unconventional ways,” and pay homage to rural Southern forms like dogtrots and roadside trailers. 

Other artworks in the Mockbee archive are personifications, amalgamations and animalia that praise the people he knew, many of them Hale County, Alabama, heroes turned mythological guides. 

“He was redesigning the world as he was making everything,” says Mississippian Robert Ivy, friend of Mockbee’s, the first to write about him and past CEO of AIA and editor-in-chief of Architectural Record. “He saw it differently from you or I, and he reinterpreted it for us. And we saw it more clearly through his eyes.”

Mockbee’s legacy

The Rural Studio, the pioneering design-build program that Mockbee co-founded with D.K. Ruth at Auburn University, remains a standard-bearer for education and civic responsibility in the field of architecture. Its impact still reverberates in the Hale County, Alabama, communities it serves, and through the hundreds of graduates it has guided toward careers and lives of deep meaning and purpose. 

The homes and structures he built with Coker are monuments to Southern culture, material and aspiration; each an unofficial pilgrimage site to those with good taste. Those who knew Sambo (or Big Mock, another nickname) tell tales about his good-natured exploits — such as when he won his first big award at a regional conference for the American Institute of Architects and proceeded to do a swan dive into the Sandestin Resort pool wearing a full suit. He scored himself a 3.5. 

The Cook House, a master work designed by Samuel Mockbee and architectural partner Coleman Coker. Credit: Tim Hursley

Those who read about Mockbee might ask themselves the same questions he asked himself: What is my moral responsibility to my brothers and sisters in need? To the truth? To beauty? What work needs doing to make this world a better place? 

“… As an artist or an architect, I have the opportunity to address wrongs and try to correct them,” Mockbee once said. In one of his notebooks from 1994, he inscribed: “I will fight until I die against the cruelty of small ambition,” a quote attributed to an anonymous boyhood friend of poet William Butler Yeats. 

To inspire dialogue around the archive, Carol, Bonner and McManus organized the Southern Curatorial Odyssey in June, a national invitation to travel to the Deep South for four days to see, feel, taste and touch the raw material that shaped Mockbee’s work. Represented were institutions including the High Museum of Art, SFMOMA, Harvard University, the National Building Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Carnegie Museum of Art. 

The group traveled from Memphis through the Delta, to the Mockbee home in Canton (a museum in its own right), and then to the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson for an exhibition and discussion. 

From left to right, Monica Obniski, Joshua McManus and Raymond Ryan gather on the front porch of Maude Schyler Clay and Langdon Clay’s home in Sumner, Mississippi. Credit: Paxson Stanford

They visited some of the same haunts Mockbee frequented on his own annual “odysseys” in the 1990s with students. They traveled past cotton-gin ruins and cypress swamplands and roadside barbecue pits and folk-art environments and Old South mansions and tin-roofed tractor sheds. 

“Those (Rural Studio) trips were about increasing their imagination as students,” said Mockbee’s architectural partner Coker, founder and former director of the Gulf Coast DesignLab at the University of Texas-Austin.  “You can live in this country and not know what’s going on outside your neighborhood if you choose to.” 

Discovery means excavation, Coker adds. “You’ve got to get that shovel and dig.” 

Architects as ‘designers of social change’

Mockbee’s odysseys were not Homeric epics, but those of home. He was a “homer,” to be sure, in the way that a baseball fan believes steadfastly in his local team like it is religion, knows every statistic in the almanac a hundred years back, and lives and dies by every inning, whether the squad is the favorite or the underdog. Perhaps more so when they are the underdog.

“Architects are by nature and pursuit, leaders and teachers,” Mockbee said. He invited students to “step over that threshold” into intimate interaction with clients in need, many of whom had been beaten down by the generational toll of poverty and disenfranchisement. 

It is part of “that mythology that we carry around as Southerners,” said Coker. “This weight we carry around on our back about slavery, about Jim Crow.” 

In this context, the Rural Studio built homes, community spaces and relationships with those who did not have the means to hire a builder, much less an architect. These structures are poetic and sculptural — indeed, high art — but their aesthetic language is that of the Southern agrarian and their ethos one of empathetic egalitarianism. The Rural Studio’s materials: old tires, repurposed automobile windshields, hay bales, local donated timber, scrap squares of carpet, everything useful they could find.

“Mockbee’s alchemy was … going out to the poorest county, Hale County, and trying to do the work,” said Coker. “And at the same time, educate architects of the social responsibilities that they could have, the potential they could have as designers of social change, rather than just designing buildings that had aesthetic quality.”

On the Southern Curatorial Odyssey, the group traversed much of the Mississippi Delta — that most Southern place where landscape and architecture and history are so hauntingly distilled. 

Attendee of the Southern Curatorial Odyssey walks up to the barn where Emmett Till was murdered in Drew, Mississippi, in June 2026. Credit: Paxson Stanford

One of the most resonant stops was the barn in Drew on Milam Plantation where Emmett Till’s murderers put him to death. With guides from the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, they paid their respects with an extended silence. 

“It was bone chilling and sobering,” recalled McManus, one of the organizers of the Better Together initiative. “(It’s) the moment that will permanently affect me.” When they departed the site, the procession of cars on the dirt road felt funereal. 

The 1964 Freedom Summer killings of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County hit close to home for Mockbee. Chaney was from Meridian, like Mockbee, and the two were born into different worlds little more than a year apart. 

In the late 1960s, Mockbee joined the Army and found an integrated brotherhood while the inhumanity of Vietnam loomed. Like anyone paying attention, Mockbee was forced to reckon with what Martin Luther King called the “schizophrenic personality” of the nation. 

“America is essentially a dream,” King preached. “… On the one hand, we have proudly professed the noble principles of democracy. On the other hand, we have sadly practiced the very antithesis of those principles.”

Theory and practice were interwoven for Mockbee, as were his architecture and his visual art. “I’m an architect and I’m also a painter,” he said. In his journals, he scribbled, “Nature leads to art … Art leads to architecture.” All of it led to social and cultural progress. It was the doing that made the difference. 

This is all part of Mockbee’s multimedia mythology. You’ll find Shepard and Alberta Bryant, recipients of the first house built by the Rural Studio (the Bryant Haybale House). Alberta is depicted in her wheelchair, appearing stoic and at peace. In one image, she holds a bouquet of blooming flowers. In another, she holds the hand of a winged mother goddess that Mockbee calls Lizquina. Alberta sometimes rides on the back of a giant turtle, the mythological form taken by her husband, Shepard, who for so many years bore the physical burden of keeping shelter over the family’s head and food on the table (including turtles that he hunted out of the Black Warrior River, some weighing more than 70 pounds). 

Alberta, 1998. Samuel Mockbee. Credit: Anthony Thaxton

“The young pagan goddess is (Bryant’s) granddaughter, Apple,” Mockbee wrote in a letter circa 1998 to cultural critic Paula Dietz (Editor of The Hudson Review), which accompanied a hand-colored etching. Apple is associated with fate and fortune, and her figure is in the shape of a silhouetted hand, with two of the middle fingers serving as her human legs and feet. She wears dazzling garments and a belt of gold. She holds a beaver-stick bottletree scepter capped with a magical gourd. 

Along with that letter to Dietz, Mockbee included a photograph of Bryant and his grandsons beneath a tree along with a massive turtle that they killed for food. “The enclosed photograph . . . was taken at ‘Mason’s Bend’ about four years ago,” Mockbee wrote. “I thought you might find it interesting, if not beautiful in both a primeval and contemporary sense.”

Mockbee’s is a humanistic mythology where the humble have inherited Olympus. As in James Agee’s seminal coverage of Hale County published in 1941, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” their supreme position is in direct proportion to their historical neglect. Their Mount, one might imaginatively extrapolate, is a beaver dam a hundred feet high, their ornaments fashioned from cast off trinkets that delight in the sun, shimmer like the waters of an ancient river, indigenous to this place like the leviathan loggerheads that rule the depths, on whose backs the entirety of the heavens rely. 

“He looked at what people needed and certainly he saw what was wrong,” said  Ivy, Mockbee’s friend and a part of the Southern Curatorial Odyssey. “And that’s part of the mythology he shows in his artwork. The way it’s expressed (asks): what is the nobility of the people, and how can we elevate and respond to it?”

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