Raising Products is a virtual series on art, design, and communities of color. It is about making and unmaking.
Join Design Museum of Chicago and blkHaUs studios for the fourth Raising Products, an ongoing discussion between scholars, artists, and designers.
The series will continue with discussions between Dr. Brandi Thompson Summers (University of California, Berkeley), Toni L. Griffin (Harvard University, founder of Urban Planning and Design for the American City), and Commissioner Maurice Cox (City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development), moderated by Kamilah Rashied (Court Theatre Director of Education). Their conversation will expose the design process and its relation to fabrication, branding, and artisanship, focusing on its relevance to communities of color and the history of art and design.
Participants
Toni L. Griffin
Toni L. Griffin is founder of urbanAC LLC, based in New York, a planning and design management practice that works with public, private and nonprofit partnerships to reimage, reshape and rebuild just cities and communities. The practice designs, leads and manages complex, and transformative social and spatial urban revitalization frameworks, rooted in addressing historic and current disparities involving race, class and generation. Over the past ten years, we have successfully collaborated with several major U.S. cities on the cusp of just economic recovery. Recent clients include the cities of Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Memphis and Detroit.
Ms. Griffin is also a Professor in Practice of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she teaches design studios and seminars also rooted in issues of social and spatial justice. She is founder and director of the Just City Lab, an applied research platform that investigates the ways design can have a positive impact on addressing the conditions of injustice in cities.
Ms. Griffin is the Keynote Presenter at Re-ACTIVATE, the Chicago Loop Alliance Foundation’s virtual fundraiser to support the Chicago Loop Alliance Foundation and to inspire Chicagoans to return to the Loop safely. On December 3 (5–6p), join her and get a glimpse at some of the projects, programs, and people who have kept the Loop going, and those that will help it rebuild. Register here!
Brandi T. Summers, PhD
Brandi T. Summers, PhD is Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019), explores how aesthetics and race converge to map blackness in Washington, D.C. In it, she demonstrates the way that competing notions of blackness structure efforts to raise capital and develop land in the gentrifying city. Her current research explores the complex ways that uses of space and placemaking practices inform productions of knowledge and power in Oakland, California. Dr. Summers has published several articles and essays that analyze the relationship between race, power, aesthetics, and urbanization that appear in both scholarly and popular publications, including New York Times, The Boston, Globe, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), Public Books, and The Funambulist. Dr. Summers is a member of the Editorial Collectives at City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action and ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographers.
On November 12, Dr. Summers will begin the 47th Annual D.C. History conference with the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Lecture, named in honor of pioneering scholar of African American history Letitia Woods Brown. Dr. Summer’s talk “Traces Of A Chocolate City: Blackness, Urban Aesthetics, and the Politics Of Gentrification” focuses on the production of racial aesthetics through the management of black excess in the rapidly-gentrifying H Street commercial corridor. Register today!
Maurice Cox
Celebrated for his experience merging architecture, design and politics through multiple public, private and elected positions, Maurice Cox is responsible for leading DPD's economic development, planning and zoning functions while fostering community-improvement initiatives throughout the city. His primary focus is under-invested neighborhoods on the South and West sides.
As director of planning and development for the City of Detroit, Cox created a new, resident-centered planning and development department and led innovative urban planning and revitalization strategies that championed the equitable redevelopment of neighborhoods that fostered population growth and new mixed-use, mixed-income investment.
Cox was formerly the design director of the National Endowment of the Arts under President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, where he represented the federal government for architecture and design matters and served as an advisor to more than 120 mayors on urban design issues. Cox has been named by Design Intelligence as one of the "most admired design educators in America" and by Fast Company magazine as one of “20 Masters of Design” in the United States.
A native of Brooklyn, he has a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Cooper Union in New York City and an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Detroit Mercy. He continues his 30-year tradition of walking and biking to work from a home he shares with his wife on the Near North Side.
Kamilah Rashied, moderator
Kamilah Rashied is an arts administrator, producer, educator and artist that has worked from every angle of cultural production with 18 years of experience in new program development, arts education teaching and outreach, community based programming and civic minded audience engagement. Cultivating a broad range of programs for the public, ranging from youth initiatives to live events and talks, Rashied has contributed to the development of new and ongoing programs at many venerable arts and culture organizations in Chicago including: the Art Institute of Chicago, the School at the Art Institute, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago Park District, Chicago Public Library, Illinois Humanities, Arts Alliance Illinois, Rebuild Foundation, OTV (Open Television), Hyde Park Art Center, Young Chicago Authors, Victory Gardens Theater and Chicago Shakespeare Theater among others.
The Design Museum of Chicago is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency; City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events; Truettner Foundation; Terra Foundation for American Art; MacArthur Funds for Culture, Equity, and the Arts at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and Illinois Humanities.