The Institute of Black Imagination.

Whether in the built environment, urban planning, or social domain, the world we find ourselves in has been designed.  By whom?  For whom? In a world not designed with us in mind, Black people have continually hacked, remixed, and jerry-rigged the spaces, objects, and ideas that we confront. 

The Institute is a learning framework, designed to foster critical discourse around the exclusionary nature of design, particularly in the built environment. It originated in 2018 as a library.  A library built around an acquisition of over 1,900 books from the personal archives of the great multi-hyphenate artist Geoffrey Holder. In 2020, the Institute developed a podcast to incorporate Black and Brown voices around the broader concept of design thinking.  However, the podcast transcends any one discipline, with each contributor forming a constellation in the galaxy of the Black Imagination.