Workbook
D16 offers various pathways into the exhibition and proposes that visitors find their own tempo for involvement. These pathways precede the opening, offering opportunities for sustained engagement in the form of artworks, workshops, courses, and dialogue for all. Mediation, Interpretation, and Programming extend process-based opportunities to learn, co-create, and engage.
The Workbook proposes study as an endless rehearsal, and practice as the continuous dispersal and proliferation of the lesson. It draws from a long history of practical civics, from the Citizenship Schools founded by Septima Clark in response to voter discrimination¹ to the Mississippi Freedom Schools. It offers a way in and an opportunity for involvement for learners of all ages.
As a pathway to D16, The Workbook precedes the event and accrues volume incrementally. It evolves as a collaborative prologue to the exhibition. It has the potential to form a complete book by the opening, when its pages can be printed and freely circulated. The Workbook is ongoing and undone.
¹ Clark was born on May 3, 1898, in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1916 she graduated from secondary school and, after passing her teacher’s exam, taught at a Black school on Johns Island, just outside Charleston. Clark pursued her education during summer breaks. In 1937, Clark studied under W. E. B. Du Bois at Atlanta University before eventually earning her BA (1942) from Benedict College in Columbia and her MA (1946) from Virginia’s Hampton Institute. For more than thirty years, she taught throughout South Carolina, including eighteen years in Columbia and nine in Charleston. She was a pioneer in grassroots citizenship education. (Septima Poinsette Clark, Echo in My Soul, [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962]).