Exhibitions + Culture Sites
Recent Writing Planning and Community Work with Museums, Historic Houses, and Sites of Memory
Dix Park
Raleigh, NC
Facilitator • Brocade Studio
The interpretive plan for the City of Raleigh and Dix Park Conservancy is based on data and stories we collected over two years of walking the park and holding community conversations about how the park’s layered history could and should be told.
Photo courtesy of Dorothea Dix Park
At the Vanguard: Making and Keeping History at HBCUs
National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC
writer • Word-Burning Stove
Word-Burning Stove is writing the script for a new exhibition about the prescience and innovation of archivists and collectors at HBCUs. At the Vanguard will tour after six months at NMAAHC.
North Carolina Museum of History
Raleigh, NC
Facilitator • Brocade Studio
Through seasons of community conversations, we elicited responses from North Carolinians who had been ignored or underserved by the state’s North Carolina Museum of History. The groups suggested how to tell their stories at the museum, and which stories to share.
Lewis Latimer House Museum
Flushing, NY
interpretive planner • Brocade Studio
In anticipation of his 175th birthday, Brocade honors Lewis Latimer — the inventor, electrical pioneer, autodidact, painter, poet, and son of enslaved parents who claimed their freedom. We created an interpretive plan then added editorial services for the museum's revised permanent exhibition that will amplify the legacy of Latimer and other inventors and creators of color. This center for STEAM education is located in Flushing, a vibrant and changing neighborhood.
Read the New York Times coverage
Burying Ground at University of Richmond
Richmond, VA
storyteller • Word-Burning Stove
The Burying Ground is a memorial to the unknown enslaved people buried at the University of Richmond in Virginia. Toni is collaborating with descendants, architects, artists, and historians to write a commissioned, poetic narrative for the memorial.
City of Hope
Script editor • word-burning stove
This will be no mere one-day march in Washington, but a trek to the nation’s capital by suffering and outraged citizens who will go to stay until some definite and positive action is taken to provide jobs and income for the poor.
— Martin Luther King Jr., press conference announcing the Poor People’s Campaign
December 4, 1967
For 43 days in 1968, demonstrators lived on Washington DC’s National Mall in a tent city known as Resurrection City. Smithsonian’s NMAAHC and SITES organized a traveling poster exhibition to honor Dr. King’s last mission for economic justice and opportunity.