Event Notices

Open House March 17, 2012, 4 p.m. – 6 p.m.

Creative Activism and the CTJM Nov. 10, 2011, 6 p.m. – 8 p.m.

Torture Survivors: A Roundtable Oct. 29, 2011, 4 p.m. – 6 p.m.

Design Charrette Featuring Preston Jackson Aug. 7, 2011, noon – 4 p.m.

Roundtable: What Political Work can a Memorial Project Do? July 24, 2011, 3 p.m. – 5 p.m.

Blog Headlines

CTJM in F Newsmagazine May 5, 2012

Propeller Fund Grant Oct. 22, 2011

Last Week's Charrette Aug. 15, 2011

We invite artists and those who seek justice of all kinds to submit proposals for a monument to memorialize the Chicago police torture cases. Our goal is to honor the survivors of torture, their family members and the African American communities affected by the torture. The monument will also recall and honor the nearly two-decades long struggle for justice waged by torture survivors and their families, attorneys, community organizers, and people from every neighborhood and walk of life in Chicago. See the Call for Proposals to contribute, check out who is involved in this project and read further background on the torture cases and testimony.

Contact Us

justicememorials@gmail.com

CTJM in F Newsmagazine May 5, 2012

Annette Elliot writes for F Newsmagazine:

Chicago’s dark history of police brutality and corruption has long been shrouded in silence. A determined group of activists, journalists and lawyers has condemned the willful blindness of the city and the state of Illinois. Former Cook County state’s attorney and later mayor Richard M. Daley currently faces conspiracy allegations in a lawsuit filed by Michael Tillman for ignoring abuse complaints filed against the police and aiding in the cover-up.

Holmes, a former leader of the Black Gangster Disciples, remembers the police torture of May 30, 1973: "I remember looking around the room at the other officers. I thought one of them would say that enough was enough. They never did."

The police force and the city refuse to admit responsibility or apologize for the torture.

"What you see before you today is a very bitter man," confessed Darrell Cannon at a roundtable discussion of torture survivors. In 1983, after a forced confession, Cannon was convicted of murder and incarcerated for 24 years before he was exonerated and released. "I keep hatred within me. I would never in life tell you that I could forgive. As long as I’ve got breath in my body, I will never forgive."

In the mahogany dining room of the Jane Addams Hull House, a group of artists, activists and educators gathered. The March 17 Open House was the continuation of a series of grassroots charrettes and roundtable discussions to generate ideas for memorials of the Chicago torture cases.

Read the article

Propeller Fund Grant Oct. 22, 2011

Last Week's Charrette Aug. 15, 2011

Image Credit: Tempestt Hazel.

Last week CTJM hosted a charrette at Experimental Station, a neighborhood arts and ecology center in the Woodlawn area. We were visited by Tempestt Hazel of Sixty Inches From the Center, a web archive documenting art in Chicago. Below is their report from the event and some photos they took.

After nearly four decades of build up, our city’s history with police torture reached a turning point in 2010 with the trial of Jon Burge, the former commander of the Chicago Police Department accused of coercing confessions out of over one hundred wrongfully accused individuals through inhumane methods. Burge’s sentencing in January brought a small, in terms of years of incarceration, yet significant sense of justice to a series of acts that devastated an inexcusable number of individuals, families and an entire community since 1972.

(Image Credit: Tempestt Hazel.)

Although Burge is behind bars for what he did over the years, the residue of his actions still exists. In an effort to call attention to these injustices and the long road it took to get the voices of those affected heard, the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials project was created. This initiative is calling on artists, community members and organizers, activists and those directly affected to come together and create a monumental public act or object dedicated to the cause and its effects. They are currently accepting proposals. On August 7th, I took a trip to Experimental Station during one of the charrettes, a design workshop and brainstorming session where participants took part in stream of consciousness writing from prompts, tossed around the possibilities of how these memorials could manifest and Chicago artist Preston Jackson shared his experience with creating public memorials. The following are some photos from that session.

The organizers of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials (CTJM) Project:

Dorothy Burge is the Internship Coordinator for Associated Colleges of the Midwest. She also teaches seminars on systematic racism, criminal justice, and social problems.

Sali Vickie Casanova, educator/artist/activist, is a member of the US Human Rights Network and Black People Against Police Torture. Much of her cultural work with youth and educators confronts abuses of justice in the U.S. juvenile system especially in communities of color. She holds the MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching) from Columbia College, MBA and BA degrees from Indiana University, and recently received the Award for Excellence in Urban Studies and Community Development from IU Northwest. Ms. Casanova's efforts as teaching/performing artist are dedicated to empowering youth and activists to transform the movement for social justice and human rights.

Adam Green is Associate Professor of History and the College and Master of the Social Science Collegiate Division at The University of Chicago, concentrates in U.S. history and African American history. He is author of Selling the Race: Culture Community and Black Chicago, 1940-1955 and co-editor of Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism. Adam has lectured on campuses and community venues, and has appeared on WTTW (PBS) Chicago, WBEZ Chicago (radio), Al-Jazeera, BBC (radio) and C-SPAN. He’s been involved in community initiatives in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles related to police accountability and educational justice.

Alice Kim is a cultural organizer, writer and a longtime anti-death penalty and criminal justice reform activist. She is on the editorial board of In These Times magazine and the advisory board of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University Law School. She is also the director of The Public Square, a program of the Illinois Humanities Council, that creates spaces for public conversations about social, political and cultural issues.

Carla Mayer's primary work focus is as an arts administrator and program manager for a municipal agency. She is a committed youth developer and creative activist. As an installation artist and sculptor, her work focuses on silenced voices, elemental materiality and including non-artists in the process of art-making. She has a master’s degree in interdisciplinary art from Columbia College, a bachelor’s degree in literary theory from Brown University and is a state certified art teacher.

Joey Mogul, is a partner at the Peoples Law Office in Chicago, Illinois and director of DePaul University' civil rights clinic.  Mogul has been involved in the campaign for justice for Chicago police torture survivors for the past fourteen years both as an attorney and as an activist.  Mogul was one of the founding members of the Campaign to Prosecute Police Torture and traveled to Geneva, Switzerland to successfully present the Chicago police torture cases to the United Nations Committee Against Torture in 2006.

A. Laurie Palmer is an artist, writer, and teacher. She has shown her visual work, which takes various forms as sculpture, installation and public projects, nationally and internationally, and she has published her writing in art journals and as independent projects. Her work has received support from the Louis Tiffany Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, The Graham Foundation, the ArtCouncil (now Artadia), and the Radcliffe Institute. Palmer teaches in the Sculpture Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Amy Partridge is an artist, activist, and Associate Director of Gender Studies at Northwestern University. As a Mess Hall "key-holder," she has organized events, exhibitions, and extensive collaborative projects with Iraq Veterans Against the War/Warrior Writers, Tamms Year Ten, White Rose Catholic Worker, Sewing Rebellion, AREA, Project NIA, and a reading group with Danville prisoners. She is a collective member of Cheap Art for Freedom Collective, Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor, and the Slow-Motion Research-Action Collective. From 2009-2011, she was a community representative and Chair of the "Arts & Other" Committee in the 49th Ward Participatory Budgeting Process.

Mary Patten is a visual artist, video-maker, writer, educator, and political activist. In all her work, she seeks to address collisions as well as alignments between the worlds of “politics” and art-making. Her book-length essay, Revolution as an Eternal Dream: The Exemplary Failure of the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, was recently published by Half Letter Press. She has exhibited and screened her work widely, and has directed, curated, and participated in many large-scale collaborative art projects for over thirty years, including Pathogeographies (with Feel Tank Chicago), “Depression: What is it Good For?” at the Gene Siskel Film Center; Project Enduring Look; Group Material’s “Your Message Here” (with ACT UP/Chicago); Artists’ Call against Intervention in Central America; and Cityarts Workshop. She teaches in the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sarah Ross is an artist who creates forms like clothing, signage and postcards to visualize struggles around space, class, access, and gender.  She often works collaboratively on projects such as Compass and Regional Relationships. Sarah teaches at The School of the Art Institute Chicago and works with incarcerated artists at an Illinois state prison. Images and ideas can be found at www.insecurespaces.net

Ellen Rothenberg's work is concerned with the politics of everyday life and the formation of communities through collaborative practices. She is a recipient of grants from the NEA, the Bunting (now Radcliffe) Institute, Engelhard Foundation, LEF Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council. Rothenberg's work has been presented at London's Royal Festival Hall; Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen; National Museum for Contemporary Art, Bucharest; Museum London, Ontario; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art and Museum of Fine Arts; and CUNY’s James Gallery NYC; among others. Rothenberg teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ben Stagl is an interdisciplinary artist, activist, and community organizer. He received his BFA from Oregon State University and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. His projects range from sculptural installation to digital media and he is largely concerned with how humans continue to address and experience shared spaces. His projects have received support from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts and Cultures Council, The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, The Chicago Pop-Up Loop Alliance, and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids. Stagl instructs casting and patina workshops at colleges around Oregon and Illinois and he currently works as Operations Manager at an artisan casting service in Chicago.

Brett Stockdill is an educator, writer, and activist. He is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Women’s Studies, and Latino & Latin American Studies at Northeastern Illinois University.

Jan Susler, a lawyer since 1976, has been a partner at the People’s Law Office since 1982, with a focus on police misconduct civil rights, political prisoners and prisoners’ rights including litigation, advocacy and educational work around control unit prisons. Her work with the Puerto Rican Independence Movement and with progressive movements challenging U.S. foreign and domestic policies has been a constant throughout her career. Attorney for the Puerto Rican political prisoners for over three decades, she served as lead counsel in the efforts culminating in the 1999 presidential commutation of their sentences. She continues to represent those who remain imprisoned.

The Advisory Board for the CTJM project include:

• Locke Bowman, Legal Director of the Mac Arthur Justice Center
• Darrell Cannon, Chicago Police Torture survivor
• Sali Vickie Casanova, Cultural Artist/Educator, Black People Against Police Torture
• Bernardine Dohrn, Northwestern Children Family and Justice Center
• Mary Fabri, Director, Torture Treatment Services & International Training of the
• Heartland Alliance Marjorie Kovler Center
• Susan Gzesh, Executive Director of the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago
• Anthony Holmes, Chicago Police Torture survivor
• Mariame Kaba, Founder and Director of Project NIA
• Kevin Kaempf, Artist and Educator
• Ronald Kitchen, Chicago Police Torture Survivor
• Mary L. Johnson, Activist and mother of Chicago Police torture survivor Michael Johsnon
• Andrea Lyon, Director of the Center for Justice in Capital Cases, DePaul University College of Law
• Erica Meiners, Critical Resistance, Chicago
• Mary D. Powers, Coordinator of Citizens Alert
• Michaela Purdue, Community Organizer and Human Rights Advocate
• Therese Quinn, Activist/Teachers for Social Justice
• Jane Ramsey, Executive Director, Jewish Council on Urban Affairs
• Howard Saffold, Positive Anti-Crime Thrust
• Mario Venegas, Human Rights Activist
• G. Flint Taylor, People's Law Office
• Standish Willis, member of National Conference of Black Lawyers, founder of Black People Against Police Torture