A couple of readers have emailed me in the past 5 weeks or so to ask about how preparations and planning for the Black/Inside exhibition are going. I thought that I would provide a general update today.

Regular readers of this blog are aware that Black/Inside considers how a system of imprisoning Black men and women in the United States has been sustained from colonial times to the present. I am working on the exhibition with my friend Teresa Silva who is co-curating and my friend Billy Dee who is helping to design the exhibition. Two other people, Maria and Glenance, are also providing other support.

Honestly, I am at the stage in this project where I have no idea which side is up. We have many of the artifacts that will be shown in the exhibition already since they will be drawn mostly from my personal collection. At this point, our biggest obstacles are funding, time, and too many ideas.

One exciting recent development is that I was contacted by Dawn Hancock of Firebelly Design about a month ago. She asked if my organization might benefit from some pro-bono assistance from designers. It was such an exciting opportunity and came out of the blue. I thought of two ways that her designers could help us. One was to create a publication that I had been working on for Black/Inside and the other was to create a poster for a campaign to close youth prisons in Illinois.

Ten designers who participated in Camp Firebelly worked tirelessly night and day (literally) to complete these projects. The publication/zine is simply breathtaking. I saw the printed copies a couple of days ago and I can’t wait to share the publication with everyone who attends the exhibition this Fall. Words can’t express how grateful I am to everyone at Firebelly and to the 10 designers who worked so diligently to produce the beautiful zine and wonderful poster.

I plan to spend most of my summer working on getting the exhibition ready for its opening in October. I’ll provide periodic updates over the next few weeks. In the meantime, You can read about the main questions that we are addressing in the exhibition in this previous post.