Juanita J. Craft Civil Rights House and Museum
Visual Identity, Exhibition, Architecture
Exhibition curation, architecture, and graphic design for the restoration of the home of the landmark civil rights leader
A Home for Political Awakening
Isometric collaborated with the City of Dallas on a permanent exhibition for the newly renovated Juanita J. Craft Civil Rights House and Museum. The museum narrates the life and work of Juanita Craft, a pioneering activist who led the charge for equal rights and dignity for Black Americans—locally in Dallas and across the nation, establishing 182 chapters of the NAACP. In 2018, a devastating flood wreaked havoc on the house as well as critical objects on display, many of which were preserved and cherished by Mrs. Craft herself. Isometric worked with a team of preservation architects, conservators, and city officials to curate, write, design, and install the new permanent display, elevating the house and objects to the stature of a world-class museum. The museum—slated to become the only site in Texas on the Civil Rights Trail—immerses visitors in eight decades of civil rights history, honoring Juanita Craft’s legacy by recreating her “house of power” as a contemporary site for memory, celebration, and activism.
Exhibition fabrication and installation by Parz Designs.
Graphics production and installation by Full Point Graphics.
Documenting the struggle for justice
In Juanita Craft’s lifetime, her house served as a home base for generations of young activists striving to find their place in the civil rights struggle. Mrs. Craft always said, “I had no children, so I adopted the world.” This exhibit continues the legacy of civic transformation, presenting a vast and complex history with clarity, while also ensuring accessibility for a range of audiences and ages. The graphic design evokes the excitement of Mrs. Craft’s scrapbooks, deploying bold color, silhouette cutouts, and uplifting typography. The narrative tracks American history from enslavement and racial violence to legal victories and community liberation. We created a custom typeface called Craft for the exhibit titles, based on lettering from the physical silkscreen Mrs. Craft and her “Craft Kids” used to print protest signs. The two weights of the typeface augment exhibition didactics, physical signage, and donor recognition with a distinctive sense of time and place.
Protecting a Legacy of Civic Engagement
Custom casework made from African Sapele wood is a major component of the exhibition architecture, designed to display and protect precious historic objects Juanita Craft collected throughout her life. The metalwork’s matte charcoal finish and distinctive half-arch structural supports are inspired by mid-century Modern furniture Mrs. Craft owned, including a wood and metal “New Domestic” sewing machine. Floor cases stand in the center of rooms, allowing visitor access from all directions, while wall-mounted cases cantilever off the museum walls, suspending objects weightlessly at eye level. The cases and exhibition lighting are finely calibrated to protect original objects from the Juanita Craft Collection, including a hand painted tintype of Mrs. Craft as an infant, a protest sign used in lunch counter demonstrations, a handbag with a sticker that reads “Pay Your Poll Tax,” and a scrapbook documenting a visit to the White House.
Fostering a Space for Community
Juanita Craft made her home a space for convening, community, and collaborative action. She hosted everyone from Thurgood Marshall and Rosa Parks to Pullman porters and young people who needed a place to stay. The exhibition design continues her efforts to make 2618 Warren Avenue an active and welcoming community space. The final, largest gallery is styled as a Legacy Library, with custom-designed furniture and a clipboard response interactive that invite visitors to stay a while and contemplate their own dreams for a better world. The library looks back onto the kitchen through a contemporary reinterpretation of Mrs. Craft’s spice rack, which is open from two sides and doubles as a case for trinkets she made and collected, as well as a surface for donor recognition.
