Invisible Institute

Invisible Institute is embarking on the next stage of its work with young people under the leadership of Senior Editor Audrey Petty. This next phase builds on our Youth/Police Project and its dedication to the ongoing critical inquiry of young people, and to amplifying their concerns, their insights and their skills as interlocutors.   

Our work emerges from the summers of 2022 and 2023, when a group of high school students and young adults gathered to learn about the Chicagoan Dr. Margaret Burroughs: artist, teacher, writer, collector, traveler, museum founder and administrator whose life’s work was dedicated to the struggle for racial, social and economic justice. At the outset of these summer sessions, students were posed the same question Margaret Burroughs regularly asked her students: What will your legacy be?  

With five young people forming a reporting corps, we are exploring an aspect of Burroughs' community work that we find especially compelling: her decades-long volunteer work as an educator at Cook County Jail and Stateville Prison. To this end, we have been interviewing some of Burroughs’ former students, artists whose crafts were seeded and/or sustained by her mentorship. 

To prepare for these conversations, we have become familiar with an archive of Burroughs’ papers housed at the South Side Community Art Center. And we regularly return to an essential text, Our Girl Tuesday: An Unfurling for Dr. Margaret T.G. Burroughs (Tara Betts, Tempestt Hazel, Skyla Hearn, Mariame Kaba and Sarah Ross, Haymarket Press, 2021), which contains interviews with former students who knew Margaret Burroughs well. We have also studied the Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration exhibition curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood to think more closely about art made in prisons across the US, and to carefully consider and discuss forms of resistance and discourse generated by the praxes of incarcerated artists.