The Institute of Black Imagination, in the Oculus at the World Trade Center PATH station, is an experiment in cultural alchemy. It turns a retail store called Space 001, typically a space for transaction, into a place of transformation, providing public access to an archive of thousands of books, periodicals and record albums pertaining to Black culture. The store serves as a platform for innovative Black designers of all kinds, who sometimes make personal appearances.
The institute, a nonprofit, was opened in October 2024 by Dario Calmese, a creative director for the Pyer Moss fashion brand, an intermittent dance choreographer and a visual artist. In 2020 he became the first Black photographer to shoot a Vanity Fair cover (of the actress Viola Davis).
There is also a podcast from the institute, of the same name, that explores unconventional thinking from a range of industries and disciplines. One of its purposes, Calmese says, is “to give people access to the conversations I wish I had access to when I was a young Black kid in St Louis.”
Last week, I.B.I. celebrated the 100th episode with a live recording at Space 001, featuring Paul Tazewell, who recently won the Academy Award for best costume design for “Wicked.”
I recently spoke with Calmese about the origins of I.B.I. and what he hopes to accomplish in this location. The interview has been edited for clarity.
How did the institute come about?
I choreographed a dance for Carmen de Lavallade, an incredible dancer with Alvin Ailey, and then also met her husband, Geoffrey Holder, who was a singer, dancer, painter, choreographer and costume designer, and the first Black man to win a Tony Award for best director of a musical, and for costume design, for “The Wiz” in 1975.
He passed away in 2014, and I was invited to his storage lofts in East Harlem. When I saw this room — costumes and paintings and sculpture and a sea of books — my first thought was, this is the blueprint to creativity Geoffrey left behind.
Prior to this, most of my life and my career, I’ve been looking for a type of mentor, someone who was existing in this multivalent way. I kind of posthumously found that mentor. My next step was to get and keep these books together. There were books on fashion design, drawing, painting instruction, art monographs, mythology, occult books about divination, Black studies, erotica. It was just phenomenal. I had the idea of creating a reference library to share with other Black and Brown creatives.
This whole thing is about access. For three years I petitioned Carmen and her son, Leo, who were managing the disposition of Geoffrey’s collection, to let me have a portion of it to create this library. In 2018 they agreed, but I had no money.
How did you find the money?
For years the books existed in my studio while I wrote grant applications and then started the podcast so that I could build a community around this idea. Deborah Cullen-Morales, an officer at the Mellon Foundation, became aware of my project and invited me to apply for a grant. In 2021, I received the first disbursement of $500,000, and they renewed the grant two years later.
I think of an institute as an organization with an educational or social role tied to a particular objective. Is that the case with I.B.I.?
Think of the I.B.I. as the central node. The podcast, our digital interactive archive — which is blackimagination.com — the physical archive of books, vinyl records, and periodicals, and then the store, Space 001, all become outputs of this more central idea.
As much as we are dedicated to research, and history, it’s not behind some pay wall. I want to meet people in the mall, on the street. Our lives, our beauty should be ubiquitous. You should be in the mall and stumble into Audre Lorde [the feminist activist, writer and poet], or a book by Nikki Giovanni [an American poet, writer and educator].
Is this why the store is in the Oculus? It seems odd to have a space that’s supposed to be experimental in the context of such naked commerce.
We chose the Oculus not because of the retail element, but because it was the most centralized location for all the historic Black neighborhoods in New York City — 30 minutes from Uptown, 30 minutes from Newark or 30 minutes or less from Brooklyn.
Then [we] decided to subvert this space. How do you walk out richer than when you came in? You come in for the coat, and then you stumble into ancient Egyptian magic, or you see a Tom Ford book, and then you discover this incredible designer out of Norway. We meet people at their curiosity. We want to ensure that the next generation of dreamers and thinkers have the tools and resources they need to imagine the world we will all live in.
How did you decide who to feature in the store? Are these designers chosen by certain criteria?
It’s more who I am excited by, and who many people don’t know about. We invite incredible designers from all around the world, either taking their work on consignment — selling it for them for a percentage of the sale — or buying from them wholesale.
For example, we feature Nifemi Marcus-Bello [recently shortlisted for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize], an industrial designer from Lagos, Nigeria, mostly working in high-end furniture. We have a floor lamp and a couple of his LM stools.
We have T-Michael, a Ghanaian by way of London and living in Bergen, Norway, and via the brand Norwegian Rain he and his partners make essentially the best raincoats in the world. He has stores in Paris, Tokyo, Oslo and Bergen but no distribution in North America. We are getting Ashya bags by Ashley Cimone, a designer who makes gorgeous leather bags that are produced in Los Angeles.
It seems that the podcast offers other voices besides designers. Is this true? What key cultural figures have you had on the podcast?
[Gospel musician] Kirk Franklin; Lesley Lokko, curator of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale; Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist working on artificial intelligence, who is a co-founder of Black in AI.
I interviewed Dr. Danielle Wood, the first Black woman faculty member at M.I.T. and founding director of the Space Enabled Research Group, which seeks to increase opportunities to apply space technology in support of sustainable development goals.
Who do you think will be nourished by the Institute?
We reach a pretty broad audience, but first and foremost, we are about the diaspora. But this is not a Black American story or organization. This is about what we call a decentralized blackness. We’re speaking to the dreamers, the thinkers and the curious.
Historically, many contributions of Black artists, thinkers and inventors have been overlooked or inaccessible in the wider public. We’re capturing history and propelling it forward in an age where everything is digital and moves so fast. Having a dedicated space to slow down and engage deeply with these stories is vital.
The Institute of Black Imagination
World Trade Center Oculus, 50 Church Street, Manhattan.
