Numbers Game
Britt Ransom
June 27th - August 1st, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, June 27th, 7:00pm - 10:00pm
Numbers Game is an exhibition by Britt Ransom, the great-great-granddaughter of Reverdy C. Ransom and Emma Ransom, that traces the inheritance of spiritual leadership, social service, and civil resistance. Through sculpture, digital fabrication, archival media, and interactive optics, this exhibition excavates the layered history of Reverdy C. Ransom’s civil rights work in Chicago during the Progressive Era and connects it to present-day movements for racial and economic justice.
At the center of this exhibition is the story of Ransom’s founding of the Institutional Church and Social Settlement in 1896, located at 3825 Dearborn Street on Chicago’s South Side, a building that no longer exists. More than a place of worship, the church was a pioneering social experiment: one of the first Black-led religious institutions to integrate faith, education, physical health, community organizing, and social services under one roof. It included a kindergarten, nursery, gymnasium, library, and clubs for boys and girls, all aimed at serving the growing Black population migrating to Chicago during the early waves of the Great Migration. The Institutional Church stood as a vital response to the influx of Black Southerners seeking safety and opportunity in a city that was often just as segregated and economically punishing as the Jim Crow South they had fled.
Ransom was not alone in this endeavor. He forged strategic and lasting alliances with some of Chicago’s most prominent Progressive reformers, including Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow, Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus, and Bishop Samuel Fallows. These figures recognized in Ransom a peer—a leader whose theology was grounded in action, whose sermons catalyzed reform, and whose gathering space offered tangible services to the city’s most vulnerable. Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House, played a particularly significant role. She understood the risk Ransom was taking and the urgency of his mission. Shortly after the purchase of the old "Railroad Chapel" building that would become the Institutional Church, Addams helped secure its first external donation. Through her network, a check was sent from a philanthropist in California—marking the beginning of what would become a network of white and Black supporters committed to the settlement’s mission.
Addams’s support was not symbolic—it was strategic. She publicly endorsed the work of Ransom's settlement, visited regularly, and included it in broader coalitions of Progressive reform across the city. Alongside her were Rev. Graham Taylor of Chicago Commons, Mary McDowell of the University of Chicago Settlement, and Clarence Darrow, the famous criminal defense attorney. Darrow notably worked with Ransom during the 1902 Chicago Stockyards strike, helping to mediate racial tensions between Black strikebreakers and white union laborers. Ransom, risking personal harm, walked into the yards himself to convince the strikers that Black laborers were not their enemy, but fellow workers caught in an exploitative system. He then invited both Black and white laborers to his church for an unprecedented public forum, where dialogue—not violence—prevailed.
Despite these successes, Ransom’s greatest challenge—and his most dangerous act of resistance—came in the form of his public campaign against policy gambling, an underground lottery system that was thriving in the community during this time. Once he realized that his sermons were being used by congregation members to choose numbers for the game, Ransom spoke out in opposition. His campaign to expose those who were profiting from the game which ultimately led to a personal encounter with Policy Sam. In 1903, his church was bombed with the intent to kill him. Ransom survived, as did the settlement, though badly damaged.
In this exhibition, Ransom’s work is represented through a symbolic vocabulary drawn from the Aunt Sally’s Policy Players Dream Book. In the dream-language of policy gambling—objects like the bell, book, key, train, ladder, lamp, and brick house, had coded meanings and specific numbers assigned to them within the game- players would then use these numbers to place their bets. Recontextualized here, they become metaphors of Ransom’s resistance: the bell sounding a warning, the book and lamp reflecting his intellectual and spiritual light, the key signifying access and transformation, the train representing migration and mobility, the ladder echoing his vision of racial uplift, and the brick house as both church and fortress.
The 3D printed reimagined policy game objects—symbols of exploitation and coded hope—face black obsidian mirrors creates a space for reflection, divination, and reorientation. Traditionally used in spiritual practices for scrying and ancestral communication, obsidian mirrors serve as portals to the unseen, allowing one to look both backward into history and forward into possibility. Their dark, reflective surfaces suggest that knowledge is not always found in clarity, but in shadow, memory, and multiplicity. Here, the viewer is invited to confront the past not as something gone, but as a continuing presence—one that can still inform vision, intuition, and resistance. Recreated casts of policy gambling tickets appear throughout the exhibition, referencing original tickets that are now extremely rare; most were casually produced, used daily, and quickly discarded, making surviving examples—especially those with meaningful number sets—difficult to recover.
Interactive teleidoscopes—optical devices that in this case, refract historical and present day images of significant sites in the Ransom story, create layered patterns. Inspired by the Ransoms’ visit to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where they encountered the Yerkes Telescope, these devices invite viewers to consider how history is distorted, repeated, and reframed through personal and collective lenses. Looking through them, audiences encounter archival images from the Ransom family alongside present-day scenes from South Side Chicago and Wilberforce, Ohio.
Lenses—both scientific and spiritual—serve as tools for examining how the past remains embedded in the present. The teleidoscope, allows us to see backwards in time, while the black obsidian mirror, rooted in ancestral and divinatory practices, invites inward reflection and intuitive knowledge. Together, these optical instruments challenge the viewer to consider history not as distant or static, but as something actively refracted through personal vision and collective memory.
Other elements in the exhibition continue threads of time-space dialogue. 3D-printed roses recall the anonymous banker who donated fresh flowers to the Institutional Church every week—roses that were then handed out in saloons, pool halls, and street corners on the Southside of Chicago, offering beauty in the midst of despair as a way to call together community. These small gestures, like Ransom’s sermons, were both radical and restorative at the time calling people to come together.
Reverdy C. Ransom’s influence extended far beyond Chicago; he was a founding member of the Niagara Movement, the early civil rights organization led by W.E.B. Du Bois. At the movement’s 1906 meeting at Harpers Ferry, Ransom delivered his now-famous speech, The Spirit of John Brown, invoking the legacy of the abolitionist to call for moral courage, direct action, and racial justice. This powerful address positioned Ransom as a leading voice of prophetic resistance, linking the Black freedom struggle to broader histories of radical abolition. His work with Du Bois and the Niagara Movement helped lay the intellectual and organizational groundwork for the NAACP, cementing his national significance as both a preacher and civil rights pioneer.
Numbers Game also includes digitally fabricated architectural elements 3D Scanned and recreated from the Tawawa Chimney Corner House—Ransom’s family home in Wilberforce, Ohio, now being restored by the Bishop Reverdy C. and Emma S. Ransom Foundation. This structure grounds the exhibition in a spatial legacy of sanctuary, history, and forward vision, connecting the South Side of Chicago to one of the earliest centers of Black education in the United States.
Numbers Game also includes a selection of historical books that deepen the archival and narrative context of the work. These include an original Aunt Sally’s Policy Player’s Dream Book, published on Dearborn Street and used to interpret dreams into lottery numbers; The Pilgrimage of Harriet Ransom’s Son, an autobiographical text written by Reverdy C. Ransom himself; foundational histories of the AME Church; and an original souvenir book from the 1893 World’s Fair, where the Ransoms first encountered the Yerkes Telescope. Together, these texts anchor the sculptural and symbolic elements of the exhibition in lived, documented experience.
Through these varied components—sculpture, interactive media, archival documents, and metaphor—the exhibition frames Reverdy C. Ransom not only as a prominent bishop, but as a builder of moral infrastructure, someone who understood that justice required more than belief—it required buildings, coalitions, and the willingness to stand in the fire. Numbers Game insists that the past is not behind us. It is beneath our feet and reflected in our eyes—refracted, living, and unfinished.