The house photographer and videographer at OLIN, Sahar Coston-Hardy, already has a cult following after her recent appearance at the ASLA Annual Meeting in Denver, so we aren’t all that surprised that she’s working social media channels in smart and interesting ways. Coston-Hardy (@saharchphoto) and Janelle Johnson, ASLA (@janelle_rla), a senior landscape architect at OLIN, have been handed control of the firm’s Instagram feed (@olininsta) for the month of February to highlight the contributions of African Americans to the field of landscape architecture.
Coston-Hardy and Johnson look expansively at how “contributions” might be defined by featuring the work of historical and newly emerging designers, as well as activists, scholars, and landscape architecture programs at historically black colleges and universities, among others. Johnson, whose work is seen here, has also written about ASLA’s recent Diversity Summit, asking “Why hasn’t more been done to attract African American and Latino students to the world of landscape architecture?” You can see posts from Coston-Hardy and Johnson’s February Olininsta takeover, without signing up for Instagram, here: https://instagram.com/olininsta.
July 20, 2020: This post has been updated to remove a web link that is no longer active.