The Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) has announced the winners of the 2016 National DiscoverDesign Competition. The annual youth competition invites high school students from across the country to address a pressing social issue through architectural design. This year’s prompt asked participants to “identify a specific audience in need of affordable housing.”

Taking the necessary steps to prepare for climate change—and the extreme weather events that go along with it—can be a daunting task. A new climate adaptation report is intended to provide a road map to guide communities on how to effectively develop and implement their own climate change policies. Climate Adaptation: The State of Practice in U.S. Communities takes an in-depth look at some of the innovative approaches and best practices being used by communities across the country to better prepare for the effects of climate change. The report includes separate case studies of distinct adaptation actions from a diverse group of 17 communities across the nation from Boston to El Paso, Texas. The research analyzes the efforts underway, the motivations for action, and how communities have moved beyond planning to action.

I bring this up because Leviathan Edge serves as a kind of metaphor for how Walker has operated during his thirty-two year chapter in Chicago–a steady voice with a hint of stealth, whose presence whispers at times and becomes emphatic and booming at others. Since the ’80s, he has worked behind the scenes and alongside many to support Gallery 37,  Urban Gateways, Randolph Street Gallery, and the art collections at Chicago Public Libraries...The list is long and endless.

Renée Cox knows a thing or two about style. A former fashion model for Glamour and photographer for Essence, Cox had an early career in New York defined by the rapid pace of commercial assignments. In her thirties, turning to fine art photography, she began the first of several self-portrait series, portraying a multitude of stylized, powerful, and iconoclastic black women...Running in parallel to Cox’s photography is the evolving image of black women in popular American media and culture, including such icons as Angela Davis, Grace Jones, and Beyoncé. But the widespread consumption of images can erase a subject’s political message. In her classic 1994 essay “Afro Images,” Davis, a distinguished philosopher and activist, recalls that it was “both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo.”