A couple of months ago, I wrote that I was going to be co-curating (with some friends) an exhibition about a history of black incarceration in the U.S. titled Black/Inside.

I haven’t had much time to think about planning the exhibition because I have been consumed with work and other projects. As I come to the end of a major project about policing and violence, I can now turn more of my attention back to Black/Inside.

Some updates on where things stand…

First, I am happy to announce that the exhibition will premiere at the African American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago in October 2012. We are designing the exhibition so that it can travel and we hope that other cultural spaces in the city will want to host the exhibition past November.

Next, I am happy to say that my friend Teresa is serving as the co-curator on this project. She was formerly a curatorial assistant at the Jane Addams Hull House museum and is just an all-round terrific human being. It’s a pleasure to be collaborating with her again. Also, I am thrilled to be working with my friend Billy who will be offering design and artistic support for the exhibition. Billy will be designing one of the interactive features of the exhibit and helping with other things too. It’s always fun working with Billy. Over the weekend, I met a new friend, Maria, who is an artist, a friend of Teresa and is also supporting this exhibition.

All of us are volunteering our time to organize Black/Inside because we strongly believe that mass incarceration is a huge waste of resources and also more importantly for us an “immoral destruction of human lives.” We also believe that there is a desperate need to engage more people in the movement to dismantle the prison industrial complex. We need to find multiple ways to capture the public’s attention and to marshal a base of people who will feel empowered to challenge this pernicious epidemic. We need to educate more people about mass incarceration in this moment but we must ground our discussions in a historical context.

Our exhibition is framed by a set of questions that were posed by Michelle Alexander when she was interviewed for a recent article in Rethinking Schools:

1. How did we get here?
2. Why is this happening?
3. How are things different in other communities?
4. How is this linked to what has gone on in prior periods of our nation’s history?
5. And what, then, can we do about it?

There are other related questions that we want to explore too; they are inspired by the late great Manning Marable:

1. Why do black people continue to be marginalized in the U.S.?
2. Who benefits from this marginalization?
3. Who is responsible for maintaining the structure of power and privilege that makes this marginalization an enduring fact of American life?

Over the next few weeks, I will periodically use this space on Prison Culture to muse out loud about various aspects of Black/Inside. For those who may want to more regularly follow the ideas that will eventually form the basis of the exhibition, I have started a Tumblr that will serve as the “container” for my musings. I have no doubt that a lot of what appears on the Tumblr won’t necessarily make it into the final exhibition. I am using the space as a kind of journal since I don’t usually know what I think about anything until I see it written down.

The bulk of the artifacts that will make up this exhibition are from my personal collection. I have not scanned the vast majority of the items that I have collected over the years. Regardless, I have started a Pinterest board that features some of the artifacts from my collection. The board will expand as I have an opportunity to scan and include more artifacts over time.

It should be an interesting next few months and I look forward to sharing some of the journey with you.