The museum’s Black Creativity Career Showcase highlights diverse professionals in STEAM
CHICAGO – From skeletons to metal detectors to robots and beyond, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park was swarmed with curiosities for minds of all ages for the annual Black Creativity Career Showcase on Saturday, Feb, 22. Professionals from the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics (STEAM) introduced Chicago youth to careers in the sciences.
“Representation matters,” said Dulce Enriquez, the museum’s Community Engagement Manager. “This is the type of work that is really impactful for a lot of the students and their families.”
More than 1,000 students from all over the Chicagoland area explored the event’s 33 booths, which hosted 150 professionals from fields including engineering, energy and architecture.
The showcase is part of a larger exhibit, “Black Creativity,” that the museum holds annually to highlight art and accomplishments of the Black community in Chicago and beyond.
Black Creativity is a tradition dating back to 1970. Doug A. Williams, a Ph.D. landscape architect in Chicago who participated as a mentor in the museum’s showcase event, has a special connection to the exhibit’s history.
“African Americans did not have a large venue, a space that they could show their work,” said Williams. “But then this was a space, here at the museum on the west wing, that was underutilized. My father knew about it.”
Williams’ father, fellow architect Doug R. Williams, partnered with several Chicagoans including Earl Calloway, a writer for the Chicago Defender, to found the Griffin Museum event.
The event’s first iteration, which was called “Black Esthetics,” was centered around highlighting art: fine arts, painting, sculptures and even performing arts like the stylings of Mahalia Jackson, an influential gospel singer who arrived in Bronzeville during the Great Migration. It has evolved over the decades to become Black Creativity, and has expanded to include accomplishments across all STEAM fields.
“Black Creativity is in that same vein some decades later, but with that history at its back,” Williams said. “I’m excited to see this continuing and growing in different ways.”
Williams now participates in the showcase as a part of the Illinois chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects (I-NOMA), which his father helped create. He said he hopes his work, as one of the first African American Doctors of Landscape Architecture, will inspire future generations.
Carlotta Berry, Ph.D. – a Black electrical and computer engineering professor at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Ind.– brought 3D printed robots to the showcase.
“I use robots in order to diversify science, technology, engineering and math by introducing children and adults to the possibilities of using robotics… to create the world of tomorrow, which has diverse and global voices in STEM,” she explained.
Berry said she didn’t have role models that looked like her when she was a budding engineer. Now, she is that role model.
“When I was encouraged to become an engineer, I didn’t even know what an engineer was,” Berry said. “I was stubborn enough to keep going, and so one of my goals is to help kids to see they can be what they can see. It’s a whole lot easier to get there when you see a role model that looks like yourself.”
Berry’s work takes her all over the Midwest, collaborating with groups like Girl and Boy Scouts and the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. She also publishes children’s books with diverse main characters who solve problems by thinking like engineers.
Her advice? “Be creative. Be a troubleshooter, and always be thinking about, ‘is there something that I could make better? Is there something I could do to solve a problem, to improve the world?’”
Nine-year-old Ellie Sejour said her favorite part of the day was learning about renewable energy.
“I learned that renewable energy can be good and bad,” Sejour said. “Renewable energy is good, because it doesn’t really harm the environment. It’s also bad because, like for wind turbines, it can hit flying animals.”
Sejour, who is from Hyde Park, attends STEM Magnet Academy. The day helped her learn the skills needed to be a scientist one day and reinforced her excitement about STEAM.
According to Dulce Enriquez, the challenges of producing the large-scale event every year are worthwhile because of the conversations that happen between visitors and professionals.
“I hope that [students] continue those conversations when they get back home, or when they go back to their school,” said. “Because this is an event for the whole family to learn and engage.”
Enriquez is tasked with bringing in new groups of professionals for the event each year in order to keep visitors coming back. “That way, guests feel like this is their museum, that they feel like they are welcomed here,” Enriquez said.
In today’s political climate, where attacks on diversity are commonplace, the museum is committed to harboring a safe space for the communities it serves.
Enriquez said she hopes the showcase will cultivate a curiosity that participants can carry with them into the future.
The Black Creativity exhibit will be open until April 27, 2025. Entry into the exhibit is free with a general admission museum ticket. The museum also offers free admission to Illinois residents on select days.