Black Tomorrow
Art, Design, Imagination

Dario Calmese, an artist, design theorist, and image-maker working across the architectures of perception — how power, myth, and technology organize collective reality, and how memory shapes what a civilization becomes. He is the founder of the Institute of Black Imagination, a civilizational R&D lab prototyping new operating systems for human life through archives, media, public space, and education.

Ekene Ijeoma is a Nigerian-American conceptual artist who researches social, political, and environmental systems to poetically expose inequities and mutually empower communities. His multidisciplinary practice spans community-based landworks, interactive light installations, and data-driven performances that expand on Black American and African experiences, traditions, and symbols through design and technology.

Ijeoma’s interdisciplinary projects include community events where trees are planted for Black lives in green spaces across the US, jazz performances in which notes are removed from the Star-Spangled Banner at the increasing rate of incarceration in the US, interactive sculptures in which a wage-based height map of NYC is submerged in water at rising rent costs, participatory installation that invites participants to synchronize their breaths and energies with his and another that invites them to hold hands together to activate lights and symbols.

His work has been presented by Boston Public Art Triennial (2025), Bloomberg Philanthropies (2025), Dutch Design Week (2025), Getty PST Art (2025), Onassis Foundation (2024), Van Alen Institute (2022), the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis (2021), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2020), Contemporary Art Museum of Houston (2020), The Arts Club of Chicago (2019), The Kennedy Center (2019, 2017), Annenberg Space for Photography (2016), Neuberger Museum of Art (2016), and Storefront for Art and Architecture (2015).

His work has also been supported by Architectural League of New York (2025), Opportunity Agenda (2025), Community Engagement (2025), MIT Media Lab (2018–2024), New York Foundation for the Arts (2022, 2016), New York State Council on the Arts (2021), Creative Capital (2019), Map Fund (2019), Wave Farm (2018), and The Kennedy Center (2017).

He studied Information Technology (BS) at Rochester Institute of Technology (2006) and Interaction Design (MS) at Domus Academy (2008) in Milan, Italy. From 2019–2024, he founded Poetic Justice, an MIT lab and program that reimagined social justice through the arts by producing works at the scale of systems. In 2022, he founded Black Forest, a multisite participatory artwork and community forestry initiative planting over 40,000 trees for Black lives across all 50 states and producing a series of short films documenting his efforts.

His work and practice have been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Cultured, The Art Newspaper, Frieze, The Architect’s Newspaper, and Boston Globe.

Sablā Stays is a multidisciplinary designer and art director, based in New York City. Creating from a space of cultural connectivity, Sabla‘s meditative approach to design attempts to channel the multidimensionality of the collective experience through image and design.

A graduate of Parsons School of Design, her practice spans album artwork, campaigns, editorial, publications, exhibitions, and brand identities, built across more than a decade at the center of Black art, music, and cultural life. She came to the field young and by instinct: at nineteen, she was leading graphic design for Afropunk, the Brooklyn-born festival that expanded into a global cultural movement with editions in Atlanta, Paris, Brazil, and South Africa.

Her contributions include work with Solange Knowles, Beyoncé, D’Angelo, Arthur Jafa, Bradford Young, and Michaela Angela Davis, alongside foundational institutions in Black art and culture, including the Studio Museum of Harlem, Essence, and BET. In 2021, she was named a recipient of the inaugural Instagram and Brooklyn Museum’s Black Design Visionaries grant, with juror Asad Syrkett, former Editor-in-Chief of Elle Decor, describing her practice as possessing “a rigorous, almost analytical sensibility,” combining “photography, type and visual ephemera in a language informed by the internet and Black-American cultural artifacts.”

Since 2019, Sabla has served as Co-Art Director and Lead Graphic Designer at Saint Heron, Solange Knowles’s multidisciplinary platform and archive dedicated to preserving and advancing the work of Black and Brown artists across disciplines. Alongside her work at Saint Heron, she maintains an independent design practice working across music, culture, and the arts.

Jon(athan) Key is an artist, designer, and writer originally from Seale, Alabama. After receiving his BFA from RISD, Jon began his design career at Grey Advertising in NYC before moving on to work with such clients and institutions as HBO, Nickelodeon, The Public Theater, and the Whitney Museum. He holds a Masters in Design Research, Writing and Criticism from SVA where he currently teaches. Jon was also a Co-Founder and Design Director of Codify Art, a multidisciplinary collective dedicated to creating, producing, supporting, and showcasing work by artists of color, particularly women, queer, and trans artists of color. Jon was selected as the Frank Staton Chair in Graphic Design at Cooper Union 2018-2019, for Forbes 30 under 30 Art and Style list for 2020 and in 2021 was selected for Instagram and Brooklyn Museum’s Black Design Visionaries grant. His work has been featured in Jeffery Deitch Gallery NYC, the Armory Show, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic. His first book Black Queer & Untold: A New Archive of Designers, Artists, and Trailblazers was released in 2024.