the girls guide to Design Month

To celebrate our opening cut, we invite you for a festive year along our sawdust trail to “Camp Sawyer,” our 14-day gallery exhibition capped off by gatherings and events with friends, family, and fellow advocates of the urban timber movement. Throughout this year of celebration, we reflect on our ten years and dream together about the next ten and twenty at Alabama Sawyer.

Check out Alabama Sawyer in Style Blueprint.

Join Dashboard’s Executive Director, Lauren Jackson Harris, and Senior Project Manager, Anna Akpele, as they demystify the public art call process for emerging artists, and demonstrate how research, documentation, and storytelling can help create a standout proposal.

Dashboard is a creative non-profit producing transformative arts experiences in public spaces. Founded in 2010, they have presented over 150 public art projects across the United States, and non-traditional artworks from over 500 artists.

Event Schedule

• 4:30 PM – 5:00 PM: Let’s Connect — Network with Create Bham and Birmingham Creatives for Impact
• 5:00 PM: Workshop led by Dashboard
• 7:00 PM: Program ends

Creative Communities is an initiative designed to equip Birmingham-based artists, creative entrepreneurs, and nonprofit leaders with the skills, tools, and real-world experience needed to compete for and successfully execute municipal contracts and community development projects. Offered free to the public, this initiative features workshops, guided working sessions, and networking opportunities focused on topics including public art, municipal systems, budgeting, storytelling, preservation, and long-term sustainability for creatives.

Roll Call: Two Hundred Years of Black American Art opens with a conversation featuring Richard Dial, Roscoe Hall, and Celestia Morgan—three Birmingham-area artists featured in the exhibition—moderated by Jade Powers, Hugh Kaul Curator of Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art. Through photography, painting, and sculpture, the panel will explore how personal narrative, cultural memory, and lived experience shape each artist's practice while reflecting broader histories tied to race, place, labor, family, and systemic inequity in the American South.

Celestia Morgan is a Birmingham-based artist whose photography and sculptural practice explores the lasting impact of redlining, displacement, and systemic inequality within Alabama communities. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Birmingham Museum of Art.

Roscoe Hall is a Birmingham-based painter and multidisciplinary artist whose work examines histories of race, identity, mortality, and social injustice through layered and emotionally resonant imagery. His work has been exhibited nationally at institutions including the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts and the Dallas Art Fair.

Richard Dial is a Bessemer-based self-taught artist whose sculptural works reflect a lifetime shaped by labor, family, craftsmanship, and creative perseverance. The son of acclaimed artist Thornton Dial, Richard developed a distinct visual language through figurative chairs and sculptural assemblages. In 2025, his work was the subject of a solo exhibition at MARCH Gallery in New York City.

Schedule: 5:00 PM Reception · 6:00–7:15 PM Panel · 5:00–9:00 PM Gallery access. Tickets are limited; registration is required for members and non-members.