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Dreaming in ColorCreating New Narratives in Leadership with Darren Isom Author: The Bridgespan Group
The equitable future we seek requires celebrating the genius of todays leaders of color. In Dreaming in Color, hear from champions in the charge for equity and justice. Hosted by Darren Isom, a partner in the The Bridgespan Groups San Francisco office, this podcast offers leaders of color space to share how they have leveraged their unique assets and abilities to embrace excellence, drive impact, and more fully define what success looks like. Grounded in both his New Orleans roots and his experience as a queer Black leader in the social sector, Darren invites listeners into the candid kitchen table conversations that have long helped shape the journeys of BIPOC leaders. Together, we embrace these leaders ingenuity, learn from their wisdom and wit, reflect on their words with authenticity and humor, and listen as we think of how we can collectively strive to do and be better. This is Dreaming in Color. Language: en Genres: Business, Management, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it Trailer: |
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Dreaming of Art, Place, and Community
Episode 4
Wednesday, 15 July, 2026
Episode Notes:What we build, and what we choose to save, reveals what we believe the future is owed.In this episode, we travel to Chicago's South Side — to The Land School, a building Theaster Gates rescued from demolition — for a conversation about Black cultural production, community stewardship, and the long arc of institution-building. We speak with Theaster Gates, Artist & Founder and Executive Director at Rebuild Foundation; Michelle Boone, President and CEO at The Poetry Foundation; Marshall Hatch Jr., Co-Founder and Executive Director at MAAFA Redemption Project; and Faheem Majeed, Artist, Educator, and Co-Founder and Co-Director at Floating Museum. Together, they explore what it means to build and sustain worlds of possibility rooted in art, faith, place, and the slow, deliberate work of community.The conversation moves through questions of time and transformation, the distinction between culture and artist, how faith shapes long-term vision, and what it actually requires to invest in futures we may not live to see. Rooted in the specific geography of Chicago's South and West sides, it is also a conversation about what any city owes the people who made it.Jump straight into:00:00 Introduction.02:50 Theaster Gates on his calling: stopping the demolition of Black space.04:50 Michelle Boone on growing up less than a half mile from The Land School and returning to the community that shaped her.06:30 Faheem Majeed on Margaret Burroughs, the South Side Community Arts Center, and building with rather than for.08:50 Marshall Hatch Jr. on his grandfather's 1924 journey from Mississippi to Chicago and what it means to carry a 100-year inheritance.12:50 Structure as permission, not limitation, and why a neighborhood needs 50 years to think about its total transformation.15:35 Buying land before speculation, seeing beauty when things are not beautiful, and building an infrastructure of language that says Black people deserve great places to be.17:50 Philanthropy's resistance to long-term thinking and why the goal of great cultural work is not to survive forever, but to build toward a future where it is no longer needed.21:00 Cathedral thinking, the Sankofa Wellness Village, and 33 years of community-building in West Garfield Park.31:00 Faith in the unseen, Reinhold Niebuhr, and why receiving the baton and passing it on is liberation.37:46 The arrogance of perpetuity and making the case for going hard and deep with philanthropic resources.46:35 Funders as collaborators and why transparency and dialogue produce better outcomes than performance.47:00 The difference between art and arts, why systems love culture but resist artists, and the extraction problem in cultural philanthropy.Resources:Rebuild Foundation: Theaster Gates's cultural organization dedicated to neighborhood revitalization on Chicago's South Side through art, preservation, and community development.The Poetry Foundation: An independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture, home to Poetry magazine.MAAFA Redemption Project: Marshall Hatch Jr.'s organization working at the intersection of faith, healing, and community restoration in West Garfield Park, Chicago.Floating Museum: Faheem Majeed's co-founded arts organization operating on the principle that the city is the museum, neighborhoods are galleries, and citizens are cultural producers.South Side Community Art Center: One of the oldest African American art institutions in the United States, foundational to Faheem Majeed's practice.Other Resources:Toni Morrison: Referenced in the opening invocation: "This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."W.E.B. Du Bois: Referenced by Marshall Hatch Jr.: "Art is the spirit that knows beauty."Reinhold Niebuhr: Theologian referenced by Marshall Hatch Jr.: "Nothing worth doing can ever be achieved in our lifetime, therefore we must be saved by faith."Sankofa Wellness Village: West Garfield Park capital project; the largest investment in the neighborhood since 1968, developed by MAAFA Redemption Project.#DreamingInColor #DEI #LeadersOfColor
