MEET THE TEAM
Let’s Make learning easier and more meaningful.
Toni Wynn brings a poet’s truthtelling and an educator’s respect for learners to her work.
As a writer and editor, she sees big and small to craft inspired opportunities for engaging and learning. Toni’s writing lives in museums, anthologies, works of book-art, and scholarly articles.
Toni formally studied international relations, social welfare, and instructional technology. She is a trained conflict manager who supports social justice and the best in us all.
Bonnie Wallace
Bonnie has written for museums for more than twenty years. She has written with teams and solo for many clients, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, The Franklin Institute, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the California Academy of Sciences, and most recently the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial museum in in St. Louis.
She loves to tell stories in chunks of sixty words or less.
Lillian Cheeks
Lillian entered the world of museum writing when she joined the Word Burning Stove team in 2022. Since then, she has conducted archival research for the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, worked as a workshop designer/facilitator and script writer for the National Capital Planning Commission, and written content syntheses for Quatrefoil Associates.
Lillian is also a PhD student in the sociology department at UCLA where she studies social interaction and medical sociology.
Start a Conversation.
What makes a label excellent?
A good label says: Let me tell you a story.
Not a long story--we don't have much time.The first words stop you as you walk by.
The next words hold you, lead you somewhere new,reveal what you didn't know. You discover a new angle,
an unfamiliar voice, a different way of looking.
Then, too soon, it ends.
-Bonnie Wallace
CURRENT WORK
Photo credit: https://dorotheadixpark.org/visit
Dix Park | Brocade Studio
Interpretive Planner
One of the largest new public park projects in the country, Dix Park is an emerging 308-acre public space in the heart of Raleigh, NC. The land has a layered history — of hunting, gathering, and potential cultivation among Indigenous people, of enslavement at a major plantation, and as the site of the state’s first mental health facility. In partnership with experience design firm Cloud Gehshan, Toni is working with Brocade Studio to develop the park’s cultural interpretation plan for the City of Raleigh.
Toni and Josh Epperson (lead writer, mentee) at the new Lewis Latimer House.
Lewis Latimer House Museum | Brocade studio
Interpretive Planner
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.
Photo credit: https://www.baskervill.com/project/the-burying-ground-at-university-of-richmond/
Burying Ground at University of Richmond
Writer
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.
PAST WORK
Photo credit: Library of Congress
Photo credit: https://www.mcattonandco.com/work/old_slave_mart_museum/
Photo credit: https://www.tessellatestudio.com/exhibition-design-august-wilson-house
History of Lynching in Maryland | Quatrefoil Associates
Writer
Collaboration with the Maryland Memorial Lynching Project and Quatrefoil’s exhibition team resulted in a clear-eyed yet sensitive narrative for the History of Lynching in Maryland exhibition at the Reginald Lewis Museum in Baltimore, MD. From its origins in white supremacy to current forms of extrajudicial violence and terrorism, lynching has had an impact on communities, events, and circumstances in Maryland that warrant this exhibition’s examination.
Old Slave Mart Museum
Writer
This daring museum is celebrated for its unsentimental telling of the story of Ryan’s Mart, a slave market, from the perspective of the enslaved persons, the buyers, and the brokers. The exhibits interpret the domestic slave trade as it thrived at that site in Charleston.
August Wilson House |Brocade Studio
Interpretive Planner
The childhood home of Pulitzer-Prize-winning American playwright August Wilson will be an arts center, performance venue, and historic house. August Wilson House chose Brocade Studio to guide interpretive planning. Inspired by Wilson’s non-traditional education in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Toni and her colleagues at Brocade mine the goodwill and rich tradition of the arts in Pittsburgh to help create the visitor and user experience. Our charge is not only to be useful, to use Wilson’s words, but also to engage, enrapture, and nurture artists — and keep the flame lit for generations to come. The Carver [ON] Record project is seeding ideas for the arts-based, layered experience of August Wilson House.
Cultural Expressions | National Museum of African American History and Culture
Exhibition developer, Editor
As a member of the content development team, Toni worked with curators and historians on continuity of themes, developing voice and tone, and writing and editing text to give shape and voice to the museum’s permanent Cultural Expressions exhibit. The “Gestures of Solidarity” label won an American Alliance of Museums text award. Toni maintains ongoing editorial consulting with the museum’s Office of Strategic Partnerships.
Gateway Arch Museum
Writer
Toni's Word-Burning Stove team developed the exhibit script for the 45,000 square-foot renovation at the Gateway Arch National Park.
Photo credit: https://www.baskervill.com/project/emory-university-twin-memorials/
Photo credit: https://www.wm.edu/sites/enslavedmemorial/photo-gallery/
Twin Memorials at Emory University and Oxford College
Community Engagement
In partnership with architecture firm Baskervill, Brocade co-facilitated engagement sessions in Atlanta and Covington, GA, to understand what messages should be conveyed through twin memorials (on Emory's Atlanta and Oxford campuses) that honor individuals who were enslaved by early Emory trustees and faculty.
Hearth: Memorial To The Enslaved
Storyteller
Toni developed the narrative across the landscape for Hearth: Memorial to African Americans Enslaved by William and Mary, a site constructed on the Williamsburg, VA campus that honors the women, men, and children the university held in bondage. She conducted literary research and contributed original writing to the memorial.
Photo credit: National Park Service
https://www.sites.si.edu/s/topic/0TO1Q000000MBBrWAO/the-bias-inside-us
Photo credit: North Carolina Museum of History
African Burial Ground National Monument
Lead exhibit text writer for the Interpretive Center at the cemetery’s site in lower New York
With input from archaeologists and historians, Toni interpreted in writing the rediscovered history of the 17th and 18th century Africans who helped build New York.
*Excellence in Exhibit Writing Award, American Alliance of Museums
The Bias Inside Us
Exhibit developer, Writer, Editor
Toni provided editorial services for The Bias Inside Us, a science-based exhibition that has served as a centerpiece for bias awareness work at public centers across the nation.
North Carolina Museum of History | Brocade Studio
Community Engagement
Community members and cultural leaders will help inform new exhibitions through a statewide series of in-person and virtual conversations facilitated by Brocade Studio. Intent for the revamped state museum is to include fuller and previously untold stories.
Agitate for social justice.
Grow in peace.
ARTS AND ENVIRONMENT
Photo credit: https://www.museumaction.org/2017-convening-images/
MASS Action
facilitator, ACTIVIST
This resourceful community works for systemic change and institutional transformation. Toni is a contributor to the Toolkit, a guide for inciting and managing growth and equity in museums. With Swarupa Anila and Janeen Bryant, Toni facilitated the “Things Fall Apart” workshop at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Mapping Meaning
Mapping Meaning brings artists, scientists, and scholars together to support each other’s creative work and scholarship as they push against traditional boundaries. Through workshops, exhibitions, and transdisciplinary research, the collective reconsiders the role humanity plays in a more-than-human world. The project is rooted in biennial, five-day experimental workshops at biological field stations and in the Hudson Valley.
Museums and Race: Transformation and Justice
CO-FACILITATOR
As part of the change-making organization’s official launch, Toni co-facilitated their three-day convening in Chicago. A series of meetings with M & R founders in advance of the convening centered conflict management and setting a nontraditional agenda.
Carver [On] Record
Curatorial Consult // VISITING ARTIST // CO-FACILITATOR
Carver [On] Record seeks to document and preserve the formative experiences of community-members, including alumni of the segregation-era G.W. Carver High School and Chesterfield Community High School, and synthesizes them into a dialogue about our shared future. Toni co-facilitated this project with Nelly Anderson, Dave Watkins, and John Henry Blatter.
Ecollective
Member
Ecollective is a network of black friends of the earth. Environmental experience is one of the least-documented aspects of African and African diaspora life. But a lot is happening in this realm. Ecollective was founded to cover it.
Partners in the Arts | University of Richmond
designer, facilitator
The Joan Oates Institute (JOI) is an annual summer training at the University of Richmond offered by the Institute for Integrated Learning. The course incorporates local, regional, and national community experts and institutions. Educator participants are stretched and empowered through learning various art forms and technology tools. Toni designed and facilitated the half-day “Impresario Training: Jazzing STEM” with a live jazz band at JOI (University of Richmond) from 2011 until 2014.