As part of the Simmons Center’s 10th Anniversary series, writer and ritual performance artist Cherise Morris ’16 returned to Brown for the premiere of the cosmic matter of Black lives. Through poetry, prayer, and ancestral wisdom, Morris invited audiences into a ritual performance exploring diasporic healing, ecological harmony, and racial justice.

In 2022–2023, Allyson LaForge, supported by the Simmons Center, led key efforts to inventory 10,000 cultural Belongings at the Tomaquag Museum. She helped adapt the museum’s cataloging system to reflect Indigenous knowledge systems, laying the groundwork for a major move and future use of Traditional Knowledge Labels.

To mark its 10th anniversary, the Center presented 'Racial Slavery, Marronage, and Freedom', a retrospective featuring Edouard Duval-Carrié, Jess Hill, and Rénold Laurent. Each artist, a longtime collaborator of the Center, debuted new work exploring resistance, memory, and the legacy of slavery through bold, layered visual storytelling and reflection.

In 2022–2023, the Carceral State Reading Group deepened its study of political imprisonment, focusing on Brown’s acquisition of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s papers. Members attended conferences, built relationships with activists, and collaborated with student and community groups on campaigns like Stop Cop City.

In 2022–2023, Decolonization at Brown (DAB) underwent vital restructuring to ensure sustainability, refocusing efforts and recruiting new members. Despite mid-year challenges, DAB hosted key events, including a screening of "What is this Place" and a discussion with Azad Essa on "Hostile Homelands".

Inspired in part by cultural theorist Stuart Hall, Unfinished Conversations (UC) is a new form of curatorial practice, public engagement, and programming to collect, give voice to, and provide a platform for untold histories, memories, and narratives related to the history of racialized slavery and its afterlives.

In 2022–2023, (De)Cypher: Black Notes on Culture and Criticism explored Black culture through study groups and conversations with working-class artists. The journal refined its methodology, culminating in a forthcoming edition, and hosted Cyphering While Black, a multimedia series featuring live discussions with independent hip-hop artists.

In 'Speculative Ecologies The Intimate Bond of Freedom and Green', Renée Elizabeth Neely-TANNER creates layered, intuitive landscapes inspired by the Maroon communities of the Dismal Swamp. Drawing on memory, history, and place, each painting becomes a map of liberation—spiritual, emotional, and ancestral—guided by color, texture, and care.

The Symbolic Slave Garden Student Caretaker Group is restoring and reimagining the garden as a living archive of Black land stewardship. Through historical research, hands-on gardening, and collaboration with other heritage gardens, students honor the resilience, knowledge, and cultural legacies of enslaved Africans.

The Cluster's Slavery, Democracy, and Racial Violence in the Americas workshop united scholars and activists to examine colonialism’s legacy in shaping racial violence, linking slavery’s history to modern issues like police brutality and mass incarceration.

Growth made Rhode Island’s capital city vibrant, but multicultural, working-class neighborhoods were sacrificed in the process. Traci Picard, a Simmons Center Walking Tour Guide, historian, and graduate of the JNBC Public Humanities program at Brown University is also a researcher for the project.

On Thursday, October 19th, 2023, UNESCO, in partnership with Brown University, The University of the West Indies, and Liberty Hall (Jamaica), had the pleasure of hosting a groundbreaking dialogue on Sports and Racism at Liberty Hall, in Kingston, Jamaica, within the framework of the 4th Convening of the Cost of Racism Project.

As the discussion unfolded, Michael Holding, the renowned Jamaican sportsman, cricketer, and social justice advocate, engaged in a compelling conversation with Professor Anthony Bogues, the Director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, providing insight to the impact of racism on the life and careers of promising sportsmen and women and proposing how the issues of racism and discrimination could be overcome.

In the Martin Luther King Lecture on October 9, 2023, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Prof. Anthony Bogues called for taking as an example not the dreaming, but the radical Martin Luther King, and addressing the problems of our present time. ‘Action is what makes us stand out as human beings.’

Prof. Bogues is the inaugural director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice at Brown University and is a visiting professor of African and African diaspora thought at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Trailblazer Dr. Ruth J. Simmons, the namesake for Brown University's Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, sits down with TODAY's Jenna Bush Hager to talk about her new memoir “Up Home” in which she shares her journey from poverty in the segregated South to becoming the first Black president of an ivy league university.

Artscape producer James Baumgartner and morning host Luis Hernandez visited the Simmons Center to speak with artist Renée Elizabeth Neely-TANNER to discuss her exhibit "Speculative Ecologies: The Intimate Bond of Freedom and Green." Renée explains that she was inspired by the marshes into which communities escaped before the Civil War.

The stage is set for a historic and controversial vote in the 35th Legislature today, during which lawmakers will consider whether to trade Whistling Cay to the National Park Service in exchange for a parcel of land in Estate Catherineberg for the purpose of building a public K-12 school on St. John. During that session, Hadiya Sewer, University of the Virgin Islands Scholar-In-Residence and Visiting Scholar in the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, made a case for exploring other possibilities and referenced Malcolm X’s assertion that “land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice and equality.”

Arielle Julia Brown, 2015-2017 Public History of Slavery Graduate Fellow with the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and founder and director of Black Spatial Relics, supports performance artists whose art contends with slavery, freedom and justice.

Through interviews with five Latinx and Caribbean restaurant owners in Providence, Serving a Plate Back Home explores how food, memory, and migration intersect. This photo-based exhibition highlights restaurants as sites of storytelling, cultural identity, and transnational connection. Each dish served carries history, home, and heart.

In 2023, a Rhode Island House Commission proposed some of the most ambitious sex work reforms in the state’s history, calling for decriminalization, police accountability, and protection for workers’ health and safety. Yet the final report, while groundbreaking, left out key recommendations on the racialized policing of Asian massage workers. Drawing from the testimony of advocates including Brown University professor Elena Shih, the piece highlights both the Commission’s progress and its silences, revealing how anti-trafficking policies continue to criminalize poverty and immigrant labor under the guise of protection.