Much of my career has been project-based.

During the spring and summer of 2009, I was part of a group of local artists and activists that responded to the vandalism of "Beyond the Chief," an installation of twelve signs by Edgar Heap of Birds, on the campus of the University of Illinois. In collaboration with Heap of Birds and the director of American Indian Studies, Robert Warrior, a group of us produced 100 yard signs in solidarity with the commissioned work of Heap of Birds, about which I blogged quite a bit. Distributing the RESPECT NATIVE HOSTS signs was eye-opening for me: I think many people who have been enormously ashamed and frustrated with the festering legacy of chief Illiniwek felt very keen to get a yard sign that would make some kind of positive statement. The sign was designed by Ryan Griffis, with input from Brett Bloom, Bonnie Fortune and Sarah Ross. Bonnie Fortune wrote the press release, and I did a couple of media interviews and helped with distribution. Ten days after the initial announcement about the signs, they were all in people's yards!

Another project from 2009-10 has been a collaboration with artist Angela Rivers called "Revisiting Murals, Animating Neighborhoods."
Ms. Rivers created a mural in 1978 on Park Street in Champaign to honor her relatives and others who had moved north in the Great Migration.

The mural is now faded and peeling, but Ms. Rivers conducted neighborhood memory workshops and walking tours around local histories and the ways in which the arts can animate those histories. This project is jointly organized with Ryan Griffis, Sam Smith, and Ken Salo, and Ms. Rivers, of course. In the summer of 2010, Ms. Rivers will work with some interns to digitize some of these documents, and add them to the eBlackCU website. We are also planning to publish a booklet of the mural's history and its neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s.

Two other projects that continue to echo are:

•    with Amira Davis, supporting her efforts with the Afrikan American Cultural Arts Program
•    a collaboration called Hands On, Plugged In: Life on the Prairie, that involved middle school teachers and faculty and staff at the University of Illinois.

Another project that I did with Jan Kalmar, an attempt to save the 1898 Garrett House, ended badly. The Garrett House was torn down in 2003.