About Black Wall Street Journey

Watch ‘Black Wall Street Popup’ on Youtube

Black Wall Street Journey (BWSJ) is an ongoing project conceived by Rick Lowe in 2018, inspired by the rebuilding of Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood following the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. Over the past eight years, the project, launched in Chicago, has taken many guises: public installations, exhibitions, programs, collaborations, and research exploring the histories and futures of Black resilience, creativity, and entrepreneurship. BWSJ is dedicated to investigating the dynamics of community health.

Rick speaking in Michigan, Feb 2026

The project’s latest iteration is the exhibition Black Wall Street Journey: Re and De Imagining Black Progress currently on view at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (September 26, 2026 – January 24, 2027). The exhibition is the culmination of a three-year residency at the Institute of Social Research (ISR).

Early Ticker concept drawing. Atif Akin, Jan 2026.

The tension between legibility and lived experience lies at the center of Black Wall Street Journey. At its heart, the project is concerned with information—how it is produced, circulated, controlled, and transformed into public knowledge. BWSJ examines “the story of the Black economy—how it has been shaped and told,” recognizing that information has long functioned as both an instrument of empowerment and a mechanism of exclusion. Historically, access to financial information, investment knowledge, lending practices, and systems of valuation has been unevenly distributed, reinforcing structural inequalities while appearing neutral.

Research workshop at PSID

The Black Wall Street Journey Ticker is the exhibition’s central artistic statement and is presented in three places across the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus. Lowe reimagines the stock ticker from an instrument of economic exclusion into one of public understanding and collective agency. Drawing on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Anti-Black Index (ABI), research initiatives developed by faculty and researchers at ISR, the Ticker continuously visualizes indicators of Black well-being, making complex social and economic patterns accessible to a broad public.

Collaborative meeting with PSID and Christian Davenport

Collaboration is at the heart of Black Wall Street Journey. The Ticker is the result of a reciprocal exchange. Conversations with economists, sociologists, historians, demographers, political scientists, and survey researchers helped Lowe consider how stories of wealth, opportunity, displacement, and community resilience might be understood across time and at multiple scales. At the same time, Lowe’s artistic practice encouraged researchers to think differently about the people represented within their data, foregrounding the importance of lived experience, memory, and place.

UMMA exhibition webpage

Visitors to Black Wall Street Journey: Re and De Imagining Black Progress are invited to investigate the 17 indicators developed by Lowe and his collaborators to shed new light onto trends in African American community health. Both artistic and scientific inquiry depend upon observation, listening, experimentation, and sustained engagement with the people whose lives they seek to understand. We invite you to join that process of exploration here: https://umma.umich.edu/exhibitions/black-wall-street-journey…