At the 10th anniversary of the Black in Design Conference, Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Black Student Union and AfricaGSD presents BLACK ROOTS, A CHRONO-CONSTELLATION & FAMILY TREE — a multi-part exhibition honoring a decade of design, dialogue, and collective imagination. Reflecting and expanding upon the many ways in which Black communities navigate injustice, forge independence, and cultivate solidarity, the exhibition triangulates the theologies, ecologies, and geographies that sustain survival and creative flourishing

BLACK ROOTS traces the socio-ancestral lineages of design practice within the Black and African diaspora. Inspired by the emerging format of the “chronogram,” the exhibit unfolds with a chrono-constellation, which studies how resistance methods, cultural innovations, and realms of consciousness operate as spatial practices- informing the act of making place, memory, and future all at once.

Across the summer leading into the fall conference, BiD organizers solicited an open call for designers to contribute works, stories, and artifacts that were then mapped and formally archived into a catalog of major social themes, categories of practice, and methods of making in Black design traditions. These submissions, and their metadata form the CHRONO-CONSTELLATION, a graphic timeline of the evolution of these histories and material practices, layered onto a cartography of the Black Atlantic. As a visual archive tracing migration, exchange, and innovation, the CHRONO-CONSTELLATION highlights the continuous remaking of what influences and shapes “design” through the diasporic world.

Complementing the CHRONO-CONSTELLATION, the FAMILY TREE begins with interviews gathered from past organizers, documenting the conference’s pivotal impact and evolution through the lives it has changed, alongside the collaborations and community it has inspired and nurtured. The FAMILY TREE honors all who have built and sustained this gathering, offering an intergenerational record of creative lineage that has often been denied to Black families of the Black and African diaspora.

Through these collective acts of remembrance and weaving, BLACK ROOTS asks what persists, what is possible, and what remains to be designed differently. In turn, we invite you to reflect on how all of us grow to resist, reimagine, and cultivate sustainable, just futures.

EXHIBITION TEAM
Tyler White: Co-Designer, Co-Curator
Celina Abba: Co-Designer
Kiki Cooper: Co-Designer, Co-Curator, Project Manager
Michael Anthony Bryan II: Interview Coordinator, Co-Designer
Lawrence Stephen Early IV: Co-Designer
Darius A.L. Bottorff: Co-Designer
Jabari Canada: Filmmaker & Editor
Milaun Brown: Archivist

Research Contributors: Donald Olunrotoba, Grant Stokes, Kiki Cooper, Lawrence Stephen Early IV, Mica Caine, Milena Almetica, Tyler White, Celina Abba

Artifact Contributors: Michele Y. Washington, Vanessa Morrison, Inumidun Obikoya, Alula Hunsen, Afomia Hunde, Pierce Gordon

Interview Contributors: Courtney Jacobovits, Dana McKinney White, Megan Echols, Natasha Hicks, Cara Mitchell, Breanna Taylor, Tosin Odugbemi, Kai Wolcott, Dora Mugerwa, Oluwatobiloba Fagbule

Installation: Kiki Cooper, Michael Anthony Bryan II, Donald Olunrotoba, Ibiebele Opuso-Jama, Darius A.L. Bottorff

COLLABORATORS
Howard University, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center

SPECIAL THANK YOU TO:
Dan Borelli, David Zimmerman & The Exhibition Team
Sarah Whiting