Our spaces, built and imagined, reflect our values as a society and form cultural attitudes that shape our communities, our relationships with each other, and our capacity to understand experiences different from our own. In exploring the spaces inhabited by Deaf people and the Deaf community, this exhibition examines the role that architecture plays in shaping the evolving social attitudes towards Deafness, disability, and access.

Jeffrey Yasuo Mansfield's work explores the relationships between architecture, landscape, and power. Deaf since birth, Jeffrey is a Yonsei, or fourth-generation Japanese American. He attended a deaf school in Massachusetts, where his earliest intuitions about the relationship between buildings and power emerged. Jeffrey is a recipient of a John W. Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress for his work on Architecture of Deafness, exploring how Deaf schools and other Deaf Spaces emerged as sites of cultural resistance. He is also a principal at Boston's MASS Design Group and a Ford-Mellon Disability Futures Fellow. Jeffrey is the inaugural artist-in-residence at Essex Art Center.