“Always have been. A fool who believes that death is waste and love is sweet and that the earth turns and men change every day and that rivers run and that people want to be better than they are and that flowers smell good and that I hurt terribly today, and that hurt is desperation and desperation is—energy and energy can move things ...” Sidney Brustein in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.

“Art is Energy”: Lorraine Hansberry, World Builder presents, some for the first time, photographs, letters, recordings, and published and unpublished writings by Lorraine Hansberry. The exhibition mixes mediums to evocatively capture Hansberry’s multiplicity—the world that she inhabited and the one she created in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. The exhibition was curated by Soyica Diggs Colbert and made possible through generous partnerships with Joi Gresham and the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research library of the New York Public Library (NYPL); and Alison Saar and The Lorraine Hansberry Initiative.

Alison Saar’s sculpture To Sit A While, on view through March 19 in "Art is Energy": Lorraine Hansberry, World Builder, is part of an initiative that honors Hansberry and supports those who follow in her footsteps by raising money for women and non-binary BIPOC dramatic writers.