Cornelius Tulloch Rebuilds What Miami Seems to Forget

Photo Credit: Cornelius Tulloch Porch Passages: Creole Collage

By Llerraj Esuod

The Porch as Ancestry and Architecture

For generations, the front porch in Black culture has been a threshold and a sanctuary, a legacy reaching back to West Africa before ships departed from the Point of No Return. Across centuries and continents, porches have been places where people gather, share stories, and mark transitions, a space where survival meets spirit and community becomes visible. Architect and artist Cornelius Tulloch draws from this history in Porch Passages: Creole Collage, a modern installation designed to rebuild connection and illuminate the outlines of Miami’s forgotten soul.

  Photo Credit: Cornelius Tulloch

Preserving What the City Forgets

“The project grows from a need to preserve Black and Caribbean design traditions within Miami’s urban landscape,” Tulloch says. “During the pandemic, I watched neighborhood landmarks fade and entire blocks fall silent. With climate gentrification and new development transforming the city, I asked myself, “How can design honor the people who built Miami’s cultural identity instead of erasing it?”

Erasure in Plain Sight

That question reveals a truth Miami often obscures. Before luxury towers and the “Gateway to Latin America” slogan, African American and Bahamian hands built this city. They laid Flagler’s railroads, raised the hotels that made Miami famous, and founded neighborhoods like Brownsville, Opa-locka, and Liberty City, places that taught Miami how to speak, move, and create rhythm from the challenges of survival.

Yet these stories are vanishing beneath the myth that Miami is only a Latin city. Recently, graffiti appeared near 62nd Street and Northwest 22nd Avenue reading, “No more Liberty City… East Hialeah.” Though quickly painted over, the message — like a tattoo cover-up — hangs on beneath the surface, a defiant elegy for fading Black culture and a warning about who is being erased as the city remakes itself.

A Shotgun House Becomes a Monument

Tulloch’s response to that erasure stands in Liberty City: a reimagined shotgun house at the Marshall L. Davis African Heritage Cultural Arts Center, opening November 29 during Miami Art Week 2025. Its structure, built from collage, poetry, and archival imagery, transforms a familiar home into a monument. Each panel bears witness to the lives and legacies of Miami’s Black and Caribbean residents.

“Many of my strongest memories lead back to the porch,” Tulloch says. “It stands between worlds — the domestic and the public, the intimate and the communal. The porch is where stories begin, ideas move, and community becomes visible.”

An Urban Porch for Reflection and Resistance

Porch Passages turns that memory into movement. Tulloch calls it an urban porch, a gathering place on once-vacant land that welcomes reflection, dialogue, and storytelling. “New development may generate profit,” he adds, “but cultural capital sustains the city’s worth.”

His process blends collaboration, memory, and resistance. Partnering with Nadege Green of Black Miami-Dade, Tulloch led youth workshops supported by the Knight Foundation and the Marshall L. Davis Center. With poet Arsimmer McCoy, students wove poetry, collage, and family history into the work.

“This project grows through community,” he says. “Their voices live in the structure. It’s a collective act of preservation.”

Art as Archive and Liberation

The exhibition is a connective tissue between art, ecology, and liberation. Paintings recall Maroon resistance, Seminole alliances, and the Saltwater Railroad, through which enslaved Africans escaped the Everglades en route to freedom in the Caribbean. Porch Passages reminds us that Miami’s identity has never been singular but has been creolized from the beginning.

Creole is born from two distinct mother tongues that reach across misunderstanding to make meaning, shaping a new language that carries memory in its bones and speaks everything it has survived.

Bearing Witness Through Beauty

For me, Creole Collage is a metaphor and mirror,” Tulloch says. “That is Miami — layered, hybrid, and unafraid of complexity.”

In that spirit, his work embodies what Toni Morrison called “bearing witness through beauty,” the belief that art can confront history without surrendering its grace. His imagination insists that we see what has been obscured: Miami’s story, at its root, is a Black story.