Creative Mind: Walter Hood
The acclaimed landscape designer conveys messages of culture, community, and history through his imaginative use of specimen trees and flowering shrubs
Landscape designer Walter Hood conveys messages of culture, community, and history through his imaginative use of specimen trees and flowering shrubs complemented by outdoor sculpture, water elements, and inventive structures. His practice, based in Oakland, California, shapes green spaces and public plazas with narratives around unity, nature, or the Black experience while enhancing social interactions—a strategy that earned him a MacArthur Fellowship as well as the 2025 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture.
His unique ethos is represented in spectacular gardens and grounds at cultural institutions across the country, such as the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, where wispy grass fields, serpentine walls, and a submerged mural nod to nearby Gadsden’s Wharf, where slaves arrived from West Africa, and secret gathering places called “hush harbors.” In other projects, including the in-development Peter Oliver Pavilion Gallery in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing Park in Jacksonville, Florida, artworks depicting names and lyrics enmeshed in the environment further elevate the powerful message.
Up next: Hood’s studio is leading the reenvisioning of Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center in New York, transforming the Amsterdam Avenue plaza with lush gardens and lawns around an undulating amphitheater. “One of the neighbors commented, ‘I love this because there’s no dirt at Lincoln Center.’ I do think it’s going to be quite a transformation.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Spring Issue in the section “Creative Minds.” Subscribe to the magazine.