Come Together Birmingham seeks to create healing and reconciliation from Birmingham’s dark history with segregation and Jim Crow. In doing so, the project strives to encourage racial inclusion and the unification of diverse community members. Two interactive community workshops were held to ignite open dialogue and to prototype co-creation between diverse stakeholders. Born out of these workshops was Red Mountain Collective, a social justice art and design residency. The residency’s vision is to establish the city as a hub for diversity and creativity in the South. Red Mountain Collective will support diverse artists and designers in creating community projects engaging the public in discussions of race relations, as well as participation in creative community organizing events. A full proposal for the residency has been developed and submitted for funding with the goal of launching a pilot session in the fall of 2016.
Rachel Dixon
Rachel Dixon, a native Alabamian, earned her BS in Human Environmental Sciences with a concentration in apparel and textile design from the University of Alabama. During her studies, she completed an internship with Perry Ellis International in Miami and participated in student fashion shows and fundraisers. Post-graduation, she diverged from her fashion studies to volunteer a year of service performing food stamp outreach in rural South Alabama. She later continued on to work within the communications department of the largest food bank in Alabama. It was during this time that she gained an avid interest in social design and its potential to dramatically impact important social issues.
Rachel currently lives and works in New York City. After DSI, she pursued a career in public information and wayfinding design. She is a Designer at Two Twelve, a firm specializing in environmental graphic design. Leveraging human-centered design, she creates accessible and inclusive experiences within the built environment. A few of the projects she has worked on include creating master wayfinding plans for the Washington DC metro system, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and the Comcast Center in Philadelphia.
