September 16, 2020

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent non-profit newspaper by and for the South Side of Chicago. We provide high-quality, critical arts and public interest coverage, and equip and develop journalists, photographers, artists, and mediamakers of all backgrounds.

Volume 7, Issue 26 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Managing Editor Martha Bayne Senior Editors Julia Aizuss Christian Belanger Mari Cohen Christopher Good Rachel Kim Emeline Posner Adam Przybyl Olivia Stovicek Sam Stecklow Politics Editor Jim Daley Education Editors Ashvini Kartik-Narayan Michelle Anderson Literature Editor Davon Clark Nature Editor Sam Joyce Food & Land Editor Sarah Fineman Contributing Editors Mira Chauhan Joshua Falk Lucia Geng Robin Vaughan Jocelyn Vega Tammy Xu Jade Yan Staff Writer

AV Benford

Data Editor Jasmine Mithani Radio Exec. Producer Erisa Apantaku Director of Fact Checking: Tammy Xu Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Susan Chun, Maria Maynez, Sam Joyce, Elizabeth Winkler, Lucy Ritzmann, Kate Gallagher, Matt Moore, Malvika Jolly, Charmaine Runes, Ebony Ellis, Katie Bart Visuals Editor Deputy Visuals Editor Photo Editor Staff Photographers: Staff Illustrators: Tolentino

Mell Montezuma Shane Tolentino Keeley Parenteau milo bosh, Jason Schumer Mell Montezuma, Shane

Layout Editors Haley Tweedell Davon Clark Webmaster Managing Director

Pat Sier Jason Schumer

The Weekly is produced by a mostly all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring.

Over the summer we publish every other week.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

Cover Photo by Ally Almore

IN CHICAGO Parachute journalism is alive and problematic as hell On September 5 the New York Times published a photo essay by Magnum photographer Alec Soth as part of a series on inequality titled “The America We Need.” Soth photographed people and places in two Chicago neighborhoods, Streeterville and Englewood, and to say that Tonika Lewis Johnson was surprised is to put it mildly. Through her acclaimed Folded Map Project Johnson, a Black photographer from Englewood (and a former Weekly board member), has been documenting inequality and segregation in Chicago for years, using the device of comparing North and South Side addresses. She cried foul on Twitter—“not checking or researching for similar stories/documentary photography covered in Chicago is POOR JOURNALISM!!!”—and the resulting social media storm led to an apology from Soth, who said that he would donate his $1,500 fee to her project. But Johnson’s point stands: her work is hardly obscure to anyone tuned into the ongoing Chicago conversation about segregation and representation. It should be inconceivable that in 2020 a national news organization would commission a white, male out-of-town photographer for this project. Yet it’s all too real. In response to public pressure the Times appended a note to the story directing readers to Johnson’s work, but has not admitted any failing. Meanwhile, Johnson keeps producing. Her new virtual exhibit, Belonging: Power, Place, and (Im)Possibilities—about the experiences of Chicago teens of color who’ve been racially profiled—is online at the UIC Social Justice Gallery through January 22, 2021.

South Side schools used for shelter Mayor Lori Lightfoot sponsored an ordinance seeking to transform two closed schools on the South Side to “temporary authorized fire, police or life protection services” facilities. The process to redesign the former Calumet High School (8131 S. May Street) and the Young Women’s Leadership Academy (2641 S. Calumet Avenue) was already underway. The goal is to provide 540 more beds for those needing housing. City Council approved the measure and made it retroactive beginning June 30, 2020. As the city anticipates an increase in people being homeless as the economic fallout from COVID-19 continues, more beds for those who find themselves without shelter seems critical to slowing the spread of the coronavirus. Research suggests testing has been limited among those who are homeless, but as it is gaining traction findings show a significant number of people without shelter are testing positive, and that the virus is easily spread in the cramped conditions of shelters. The move looks to save the city in rent costs currently being paid to agencies such as the YMCA and Salvation Army for use of their facilities.

Black drivers more likely to be pulled over—for nothing A study focusing on Chicago has found that Black drivers are more likely than white drivers to be pulled over by police—at a rate 5.6 times higher than white drivers, even though there are more white drivers on the road. The study, conducted by ABC 7, is unsurprising in the context of other reports showing a nationwide pattern of Black people being disproportionately profiled and targeted. But significantly, the findings also show that Black drivers are less likely than white counterparts to receive a citation for wrongdoing, meaning that they have been pulled over for nothing. Despite the lack of criminal charges, there is plenty of disrespect, harassment, and fear in being stopped for no reason. Since 2014, Chicago has been worse than Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Houston. The study, like other research, highlights a level of denial in Chicago’s police force as it maintains that it doesn’t “target individuals based on race or community.” The data investigation also showed an alarming rise of twenty-seven percent in the number Latinx drivers stopped by police over the past year alone—possibly foreshadowing another trend.

IN THIS ISSUE the student fight to get cops out of cps

“There has definitely been some harassment from our SRO towards me and other students on social media.” madeleine Parrish..........................................4 demanding answers for miguel

Miguel Vega’s family demands justice after police killed him madison muller................................................8 exigiendo respuestas sobre miguel

La familia de Miguel Vega pide justicia después de que la policía lo mató madison muller, traducido por gisela orozco...............................................................9 standing on gang territory

“If you lived on a certain block or one of your friends was in a gang, you had to deal with the possibility of being mistaken by rivals or police.” mateo zapata...................................................10 who are the protesters?

Unpacking the lived experiences of those who took to the streets this summer kia smith..........................................................12 from bohemia to the black arts movement

Two recent books make clear how the fate of the cultural cutting edge in Chicago has depended on urban space benjamin ginzky..............................................19 painting the world of covid-19

Artists at Project Onward are destigmatizing developmental disabilities jocelyn vega....................................................22 opinion: hellco

“The community already had a plan that did not include a warehouse.” josé acosta-córdova.......................................24

EDUCATION

The Student Fight to Get Cops Out of CPS In high school votes on SROs, student activism made all the difference

BY MADELEINE PARRISH

“I

n this neighborhood, there are gangs, there are kids who don’t get attention who can get to the point of bringing drugs to sell inside school, or bully,” Esmeralda Gutierrez, a parent representative on the Local School Council (LSC) of George Washington High School, said in Spanish. “Now that there’s no officials taking care [of students], I’m scared that things are going to return to how they were before. I’m scared that shootings will start up again.”

To date, seventeen Chicago Public Schools (CPS) schools’ LSCs have voted to remove their school resource officers, or SROs, while fifty-five have voted to maintain them. The decision of whether to keep or remove SROs was left to individual schools, decided by each school’s elected Local Schools Council (LSC), which is made up of parents, teachers, community representatives, and a student representative.

The initial vote by the Board of Education—a seven-member board appointed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot—on June 24 resulted in a narrow 4-3 vote to keep the $33 million contract between CPS and CPD. This initial motion to terminate the CPD contract was presented by board member Elizabeth Todd-Breland. They voted again on August 26, 4-2 with one 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

abstention, to renew its contract with the Chicago Police Department. For one year, the board has cut the contract from $33 million to $12.1 million.

For those that have chosen to keep their SROs, justifications often sound like Gutierrez’s—anecdotal fears of gangs, fights, or school shootings. But for many students attending CPS high schools, the reality of SROs’ roles within their schools is very different. “[George] Washington High School is ninety percent Latinx and five percent Black or African-American, and our SRO, his name is Alex, is actually very friendly with all of our students because most of our students look and speak the same as him. But it was always very obvious that that connection wasn’t there with Black students in particular,” Trinity Colon, a junior at Washington and the student representative on the school’s LSC, said in an interview. “I’ve never really seen them positively interact with Black students in the way that they positively interact with Latinx [students] and that’s just leaving that implicit bias there,” she said.

In addition to these concerns, Colon noted the amount of misconduct complaints against both of the SROs in her school.

One SRO, Alexander Calatayud, has had

¬ SEPTEMBER 16, 2020

fifty-seven misconduct complaints against him, a number that has not been updated in his files since 2016 and that is greater than the number of ninety-five percent of CPD officers. He also has twelve use of force reports, which are self-reported and may not be comprehensive. Six of these were for using a taser on Black teenagers, four of which took place in a public school. Washington’s other SRO, Salvador Passamentt, has twenty-two complaints against him and four use of force reports, each of which is also for using a taser in public on a Black male or female.

“We’ve been posting a lot on Facebook about the movement and trying to get the word out and trying to mobilize our students and our parents,” Colon said, and noted that using social media to voice her opinions has resulted in some backlash. “There has definitely been some harassment from our SRO towards me and other students on social media.”

In screenshots Colon provided to the Weekly, Officer Catalayud is seen to be making antagonistic comments in response to posts by students and alumni.

In one comment, he responded directly to Colon, calling her out by name. In another comment, he wrote, “For those that aren’t as ‘PRIVILEGED’ as some & may not understand stuff written in ENGLISH…” presumably referring to Latinx students, “All I have to say is that if you remove CPD from our schools and someone’s child gets beaten or is a victim of bullying, do you really think teachers will protect your child?

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT!!!!”

Though Colon and other students and teachers reached out by email to the administration about their SRO engaging in bullying over social media, they received no response. Their demands included additional support for the students who were involved in the campaign to remove SROs from Washington, and that the SROs be held accountable to the same policies to which CPS staff are held, including Anti-

Bullying and Staff Acceptable Use Policy IX. Social Media/Online Communication.

“If we would’ve kept those SRO officers, honestly, it would’ve been a really uncomfortable situation seeing them in the building if we were in person,” Colon said.

But, she said, many other members on the LSC did not seem to understand— or even attempt to understand— the perspective of the students advocating to remove SROs. The strongest arguments for keeping SROs in the school in response to the data and testimonials were “a lot of ‘what ifs,’” she said.

The final vote was 6-5 in favor of removing SROs—a narrow vote which would have likely been 6-6 had LSC member Peter Chico, a police officer, not excused himself from the vote. “I was in closed session with LSC members and they started saying that they genuinely felt bad [for Calatayud], and they felt he didn’t deserve to have his public records put out there,” Colon said. “This just kind of shows how they protect cops more than they protect students...They’re just trying to protect the system.”

“I definitely felt like [our LSC members] weren’t listening to youth voices,” said Colon. “I felt like whatever we said to them was coming out of the other ear.”

What, then, tipped the narrow vote in favor of removing SROs at George Washington High School? For LSC members who chose to listen, it was the extensive student activism. The pre-existing infrastructure formed by clubs like the Student Voice Committee, the Patriot Peace Warriors, and the Black Student Alliance primed the student-led operation by giving students a space to host antiracist discussions. A network of students across these organizations created a unity conference to further their goals. “We were already having that conversation...that definitely just ignited when I got that first email about the LSC agenda speaking on CPD in schools,” Colon said.

EDUCATION

PHOTO BY OSCAR SÁNCHEZ

She created a petition called “Make GWHS a Police Free School” which garnered 797 signatures. Students held two consecutive weekend protests and created an Instagram account that posted testimonials of Washington students regarding their experiences with SROs. “With elaborate email planning, email campaigns, and showing up at every single LSC meeting speaking in that public comment...I think that we did honestly convince a few LSC members to get our on side and eventually ended up winning the vote,” Colon said.

Student Activism Across CPS

W

ashington is not alone when it comes to strong student activism. Student-led groups across many CPS schools have been pushing to remove SROs as LSCs continue to vote on the issue. The #PoliceFreeSchools Coalition includes organizations such as Students Strike Back, a group of students who attend neighborhood high schools on the Southwest side of Chicago, and the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, a community-based nonprofit organization

serving Chicago’s Southwest side.

Together, these organizations have been working to collect data about CPD in CPS and have been using this data to power the organized group of students advocating to remove SROs in CPS. Their #CopsOutCPS Report found that the 180 SROs and twentyone School Liaison Supervisors assigned to CPS (before the LSCs began voting) had a total of at least 2,354 misconduct complaint records against them.

The report also noted that police in schools disproportionately target Black students. More than ninety-five percent of police incidents in CPS involve students of color, and Black students are subjected to police notifications at four times the rate of white students in Chicago. According to data from Chicago Public Schools, police notifications have led to arrests of Black students at a rate of nine and a half times higher than white students—out of the 11,527 student arrests in Chicago over the past nine school years, 9,001 have been Black students. This is more than seventy-six percent, even though Black students accounted for 36.6 percent of CPS enrollment during that time.

CPS students have also been working to collect first-hand testimonials regarding other students’ experiences with SROs. CPS Alumni for Abolition, a group of Chicago Public Schools alumni working towards police-free schools, collected over 250 testimonials from fellow alumni and students. “The ones that I can lump into a big category were the twenty-plus testimonials that we had where students talked about sexual harassment, either directly at the hand of police officers, or at the hands of the other students and the officers were there and just watched and did nothing,” Kysani London, an alum of Northside College Prep, which was the first school to vote out SROs. “Who do you report the officers to if they do this to you, if you’re sexually harassed by them?...

There’s no one.”

“Police at Jones harassed girls as soon as they turned eighteen and made jokes about them being ‘legal.’ They also only enforced the dress code when girls didn’t play along with their advances,” Cristal Alvarez, who graduated from CPS in 2018, wrote in her testimonial. “They constantly sexually harassed young women at Whitney Young under the guise of being those, ‘hey, girl...where’s my hug?’ type of pervs,” an anonymous testimonial from someone who graduated from CPS in 2005 wrote. “By far the most traumatic of those experiences happened when a boy sexually harassed me, picked me up and slammed me against a locker, and then felt me up against my will while the officers did NOTHING but stand there and laugh,” wrote Nora Lubin who graduated from CPS in 2013.

Student testimonials also testified to the disproportionate punishment of Black students. Mitsuru Nelson, who graduated from CPS in 2009, said, “Liaison officers would corner Black and Latinx students specifically on baseball fields in Oz Park, in hallways, and throw them against buildings or onto the floor for no reason and harass them till they ‘found something.’” . An anonymous source who graduated in 2016 said, “Police officers would more often than not target Black students and other students of color as opposed to other wealthy white students, whether through seemingly random searches or simply by observing their every move.”

I

n their CPS Alumni Open Letter, which has garnered around 3,000 signatures, they demand the termination of CPS’s district-wide contract with CPD. However, these efforts were not enough to

sway the Board of Education’s vote on June 24 to renew the contract. Vivekae Kim, a Northside College Prep alum and one of the main organizers for CPS Alumni for Abolition, said that the board was still getting caught up in dominant narratives about police in schools instead of listening to the consistent demands of students.

“The city right now is just rallying around unproven and anecdotal senses of what constitutes public safety without regard for student voices,” Kim said. “The fact that we’re still justifying the presence of police in schools when it’s clear from the data that the system is inherently racist, yet the response that’s given to students is, ‘Just keep waiting. Just keep waiting for those numbers to get lower and lower. We know that there’s a disparity, but we are not willing to engage with your reimagining of safety and resources that should be in school,’” she said.

Kim provided public comment on the presence of SROs at the first meeting at Northside College Prep on June 16th with other community members. “They really brought it to the table. After that, our two teacher representatives were really on the side of that alumni group and they were doing a lot of pushing while that group was doing their speaking in our meeting,” Luna Johnston, a senior at Northside College Prep and the student representative on its LSC, said.

In the lead-up to the next meeting in which LSC members would vote on whether or not to keep SROs, Johnston organized students in writing a letter and conducting a survey (of the 194 responses to the survey conducted, 183 said they were against SRO presence) that she could share at the next LSC meeting. Students and alumni organized a protest on July 5. “I requested that we have a public comment not only at the end, but in the middle [of the meeting] before we made the vote because I wanted to make sure that everyone… understood how the students felt before we made any binding decision,” said Johnston. Almost all of Northside College Prep’s members of CPS Alumni for Abolition were present at the next meeting—most of whom provided public comment, and the vote to remove SROs from Northside College on July 7 was unanimous, with eight LSC members voting in support of the students and one member abstaining from the vote.

Nancy Bigelow, a teacher representative on the LSC of Benito Juarez Community Academy, relayed the pivotal role that

SEPTEMBER 16, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

EDUCATION

“The idea that the police officer in their school is someone that’s going to make them feel safer flies in the face of a lot of people’s lived experiences.”

PHOTO BY OSCAR SÁNCHEZ

student activism played in her school’s recent decision to remove SROs. Last fall, the school’s LSC voted to keep SROs. “I don’t know that it felt like at the time that it was that huge of a vote, because it seemed at the time like a no brainer. You either get two extra bodies in your school… or you get nothing,” Bigelow said. “It’s not like we were given much to vote on.” But this year, her mind was changed. “Overwhelmingly we had a lot of students and community members who spoke… I received I don’t know how many emails from mostly students [and] some faculty, and all requesting that we vote against continuing the SRO budget.”

A False Choice: What LSCs Lack

A

lthough individual schools’ LSCs are voting to remove their SROs, the question remains as to whether this is a sufficient response to the needs of students across the district.

“The Board of Education has pushed this vote onto our LSCs knowing that most of these school councils have the implicit bias,” Colon explained. “And not 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

only that but we know that the majority of CPS staff is white, so it does end up in that position where you have schools that are predominantly Black but their LSC isn’t properly representing them.” Colon said that she has felt this dynamic play out at Washington as well. “In my case… we have instances where our LSC is predominantly Latino and so is our school demographic, and the anti-Blackness is integrated in that sense.”

Andrea Ortiz, the lead organizer of the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council (BPNC), also expressed concerns about inadequate representation of students in LSC decisions. “A lot of the representatives on these LSCs are not involved in the community,” Ortiz said. “We don’t even know who they are.” Ortiz said that LSC meetings tend to be structured around the principals’ agendas, most of whom do not understand or agree with the call to remove police from schools. “[They] are organizing the meetings around the vote for the police out of schools without any notification so that folks aren’t able to go and testify. And they happen so fast,” she said.

¬ SEPTEMBER 16, 2020

Many of the organizations in the #PoliceFreeSchools coalition have been pushing for the termination of the contract between CPD and CPS, not only as a way to remove a harmful presence from the school, but also as a way to redirect funds towards more formative resources. Ortiz said that BPNC has been pushing for traumainformed personnel, restorative justice supports, counselors, and nurses that “are really going to help support students and their needs, and address harm and prevent harm from happening, and not just react to harm.”

Many student activists are concerned that if LSCs vote to remove their SROs, the school won’t receive the money that would have gone toward their salaries. “It’s just a false choice,” Kim said. “The whole point is not just to remove police as a negative presence in the hallways of schools, but [also] to take those resources and to give them to the things that students actually need.”

Jesse Sharkey, the president of the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU) , explained further why the current process of delegating this decision to LSCs would not

result in more money for other resources.

“The contract is approved centrally. If they believed that the LSCs should decide, they would cancel the contract, give that money to every single LSC, and let the LSC decide how to spend it, and they could hire police if that’s what they wanted to spend it on,” he said. “But that’s not what they’re doing.

They’re approving a central contract, going to LSCs and saying, ‘We’ve approved this already, do you want your share of what was already approved?’”

While these discussions continue to take place, students and activist groups across Chicago remain worried about the irreversible harms caused by the presence of police officers in schools. One major concern is the practice of entering students into Chicago’s gang database, which has a reputation of being both inaccurate and permanent. There is currently no due process or protocol for entering someone’s name into the database and no way to be removed from the database even if the information is incorrect. The Cook County Board voted to dismantle the gang database in February of 2019, but the vote has yet to

EDUCATION

be implemented.

“We made the connection that [students] are being added into the gang database because of the police officers in the building, and being targeted and being labeled as gang members because they’re wearing certain colors or they’re hanging out with certain people or they live in a certain community,” Ortiz said.“And [they are] inadvertently targeting our Latino students who may be undocumented that then get placed in the gang database and are put at risk of deportation.”

Accusations on the gang database stay on students’ records and can lead to deportation, lost jobs and housing (or an inability to find jobs or housing in the future), and higher bails. But often, youth in Chicago Public Schools do not even know their names or the names of their friends have been put down. “I think the number is around 60,000, of youth that we think are on the gang database. But because they’re minors we’re not able to access that,” Ortiz said. “[The students are] targeted in their own community and scared to walk around their community because their SRO may see them out with their friends or associate them with someone,” Ortiz said. “Or their SRO may see them out on the street with someone, and then go to school the next day and go up to them and say, ‘Hey I saw you hanging out with this person who’s a gang member, are you a gang member?’ and then place them on the gang database.” And while students can file a request through the Illinois Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to see their information, Ortiz gave an example of the organization Blocks Together helping youth file such a request, which resulted in police officers showing up at their house with the letter to intimidate them. “So we’ve been scared to FOIA that information for students because we didn’t want to put them at risk or have them be targeted,” she said.

According to the new contract between CPD and CPS, SROs will no longer be allowed to enter student information into the gang database. Other guidelines put forth by the new contract include enhanced training and more requirements for cops to work in schools, and the board has given CPS seven months to create a plan to develop alternative school safety best practices.

But many students, alumni, and organizers believe the situation is too urgent to wait for individual LSCs to remove the SROs from their schools. “The fact that

students are just being asked to wait is just unconscionable because CPS students have been waiting for a long time,” Kim said. “When we’re talking about getting police out of schools, we’re talking about a program that’s anti-Black, that violates the civil rights of the students, and that’s up to the Board [of Education],” Ortiz said.

Sharkey, who taught at both Chicago Vocational and Senn High School before becoming the president of the CTU, emphasized the detrimental effects police presence in schools can have on students’ education and livelihood. “People need to get their head around [the fact] that there are big sectors of the population that don’t see police as ‘Officer Friendly’ who helps them get their cat out of a tree, but see police as a threat,” he said. “So especially for undocumented students, the idea that the police officer in their school is someone that’s going to make them feel safer flies in the face of a lot of people’s lived experiences.”

And many students and activists have continually said that reform doesn’t work.

“Reform isn’t an option because...that usually leads to an increase in the police budget,” said Ortiz. “When we showed that police officers were not getting any trainings in the schools, the mayor then used it as an excuse to increase the SRO budget from twenty-two to thirty-three million. Training doesn’t work.”

“There’s been a lot of data that shows that restorative justice and transformative justice practices and trauma informed personnel has really helped a lot of youth by addressing harm,” Ortiz said.

According to all of the activist groups that the Weekly spoke to, what students really need are resources and programs that will address student behavior in supportive, preventative, and restorative ways. “You get to situations where students are in a crisis at home, and rather than giving them any kind of actual attempt to understand the crisis and respond to the things they need, you’re simply punishing them or ultimately trying to expel them,” Sharkey said. “The adult people who run the most important institution in your life, your school, are prosecuting you, building a case against you, trying to get you kicked out.”

For those who have similar concerns as Gutierrez, the response is that in the long run, mental health and other community resources will do far more preventative good than the police which can only respond to isolated incidents. Mary Winfield, a teacher at Benito Juarez High School, said that in

the short term, police are not even necessary to respond to incidents that teachers may be unable to handle themselves. “I have never, in twenty-two years, ever encountered an incident at my school that I felt required police,” Winfield said. “There’s been fights, there’s been gang activity. Our first order of activity is de-escalation within the classroom… If it’s a physical altercation, the security staff at our school if they are able to, will come and help.”

The school has four security guards who are unarmed and hired by the school, whose main focus is de-escalation. Winfield said that teachers can also call in school social workers or counselors to assist. “In general, they see the students every day, all the time in the hallways. So they have a lot more of a connection,” she said. Winfield noted that the school’s SROs, in contrast, tend to stay in their offices for most of the day. “I very rarely have ever seen two kids who really want to fight each other. They’re just having

a really bad day and it sucks sometimes to be a teenager.”

Dealing with students’ social-emotional behaviors, according to Winfield, is a job much more fitting for counselors and other school staff.

“The teachers shouldn’t need the armed, uniformed authority of the state in order to get respect in the school,” Sharkey said. “What we could really use would be people who are trained, who have clinical experience, youth intervention specialists, social workers, counselors, that kind of stuff is what we really need to address student behavior. Because it is, after all, the behavior of children, right?” Madeleine Parrish grew up in New Jersey and is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago studying political science. She last wrote about how churches on the South Side uplifted their communities during COVID-19 despite financial hardship.

Have you lost a loved one to COVID-19?

The South Side Weekly, in partnership with the MarketBox team & Invisible Institute, is memorializing those who’ve passed in Chicago due to the pandemic, and is paying respect to our collective and individual grief.

If you would like to submit a memorial to be published in the South Side Weekly, call (773) 357-5002 and leave a voicemail telling us: -your name and best number to contact you.

-your loved one’s name.

-how you knew them.

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We’ll call you back to finalize your memorial.

Visit southsideweekly.com/obituary for more information about the project.

SEPTEMBER 16, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

JUSTICE

Demanding Answers for Miguel Miguel Vega’s family demands justice after police killed him

BY MADISON MULLER

F

ive days after Chicago police shot and killed twenty-six-year-old Miguel Vega in Pilsen, his family and friends gathered to demand justice and call for the release of officers’ body camera footage from that night.

Betty, an organizer with ChiResists, told the crowd at Plaza Tenochtitlán on West 18th Street Saturday afternoon they could help the Vega family carry some of their pain. “Let’s make sure this isn’t another story that disappears in the news cycle.”

Miguel was a son, a brother, a father, and a friend. Wednesday night, the Vega family held a vigil that brought folks from all over the city together. That support inspired them to continue fighting for answers.

“I’m very angry that he had to go this way,” his younger brother Erik Vega, twenty, told the crowd. “There’s other ways you can stop someone.”

According to police, officers responded to a suspicious-person call the night of August 31 at 19th Street and South Loomis Street. Two officers were patrolling the neighborhood in an unmarked car and arrived to find five men. One of them was Miguel Vega.

Police say they were shot at when they got out of the car, and one officer returned fire, hitting Miguel in the back of the head.

Miguel was transported to Stroger Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.

Tom Ahern, Deputy Director of News Affairs and Communications at CPD, tweeted photos of the gun that was allegedly fired at police. But the Vega family says that that weapon was found more than forty feet away from Miguel’s body, making it unlikely it was his.

“The police department still has not come out and spoken with us on what actually happened that night,” Erik said.

“But, the truth will come out sooner or later.

The body cam videos will come out and will show that my brother did not do it.”

The family does not believe CPD’s account of the incident without corroborating footage. They also expressed disappointment with the portrayal by some 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

media of Miguel as a gang member who shot at police.

The Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) said it is currently reviewing body-cam footage, as well as third-party video.

Organizers from Pilsen Alliance, Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD), BYP100, GoodKids MadCityand others echoed Erik’s sentiments: that safety does not come from the police.

“There have only been twelve days this year where police haven’t killed someone,” said Domincine, an organizer with Pilsen Alliance. “Black and brown people are killed in their own communities.” (Ed. note: According to the online database Mapping Police Violence, as of August 30 there had been only twelve days in 2020 in which police in the United States did not use deadly force.)

After family members spoke, people performing Aztec dances offered a cleansing and healing ritual for the family. The same group danced at Wednesday night’s vigil at Plaza Tenochtitlan.

About an hour into the event, police began to gather in large numbers across the street. Marked and unmarked police vehicles brought hundreds of officers, with others arriving on bicycle. There were also several higher ranking officers in attendance, distinguishable by their white shirts.

“We want to keep this as peaceful as possible and keep everyone safe,” Erik said before the group began their march through the community. “My family doesn’t want any more problems than we already have.”

Bike marshals and lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild formed a barrier between the group and CPD while they marched east on 18th. Police blocked most of the roads on the north side of the street preventing marchers from moving in the direction of the CPD 12th District and the Loop.

While marching, protestors switched between English and Spanish chants.

“Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe!”

¬ SEPTEMBER 16, 2020

“¿Qué queremos? ¡Justicia! ¿Cuándo? ¡Ahora!” (“What do we want? Justice!

When? Now!”) Tensions began to escalate at the line between police and bike marshals, but Betty was quick to bring attention back to the Vegas. “Why is everyone facing the police?” she asked. “We’re not here for the police.

We’re here for the Vega family. Turn hate away from police and your love back towards the family.”

With the sun setting behind them, community members and organizers took turns on the megaphone to share space with the Vega family. Fred Hampton Jr.— whose father, Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton, was assassinated

by Chicago police in 1969—and 25th Ward Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez were among the speakers who addressed the crowd.

At around 6:45pm, organizers called for folks to pull back towards Plaza Tenochtitlan for safe dispersal. Back at the Plaza, several placed flowers and candles on the ground in a makeshift memorial for Miguel.

As folks headed out, some stayed to talk with, and offer words of encouragement to the Vega family. “I actually just got back from the military,” Erik told the Weekly.

“My grandma said that I came back for a reason, maybe this was it.”

“I’ve never known someone close to me that has experienced this. It’s a first,” he continued. “I have to be strong for my parents. [Miguel] was their first son.” Editor’s note: In an ongoing effort to balance the public’s need for information against the potential for doing harm to those struggling for justice, the Weekly chose to include only the first names of organizers from whom we did not obtain explicit permission to identify in this article.

Madison Muller is a lifelong Chicagoan and graduate student at Northwestern University studying social justice journalism. she last contributed protest photos to the Weekly. You can find her photojournalism work on Instagram: @g0ingmad.

ERIK VEGA EMBRACES HIS MOTHER AND ANOTHER FAMILY MEMBER. PHOTO BY MADISON MULLER ERIK ABRAZA A SU MADRE Y A OTRO MIEMBRO DE SU FAMILIA. FOTO DE MADISON MULLER

JUSTICIA

Exigiendo respuestas sobre Miguel La familia de Miguel Vega pide justicia después de que la policía lo mató

C

inco días después de que la policía de Chicago disparara y matara en Pilsen a Miguel Vega, de veintiseis años de edad, su familia y amigos se reunieron para exigir justicia y pedir se hagan públicas las imágenes captadas esa noche por las cámaras corporales de los agentes.

Betty, organizadora de ChiResists, un grupo activista juvenil nativo, dijo a la multitud reunida en la Plaza Tenochtitlán ubicada al oeste de la calle 18, el sábado 5 de septiembre por la tarde, que podrían ayudar a la familia Vega a sobrellevar algo de su dolor. “Asegurémonos de que esta no es otra historia que desaparece en el ciclo de noticias”.

Miguel era un hijo, hermano, padre de familia y amigo. La noche del miércoles 2 de septiembre la familia Vega realizó una vigilia que reunió a gente de toda la ciudad.

Ese apoyo los inspiró a seguir luchando para tener respuestas.

“Estoy muy enojado de que tuviera que ser así”, dijo a la multitud Erik Vega, de 20 años de edad y hermano menor de Miguel.

“Hay otras maneras de detener a alguien”.

Según la policía, los agentes respondieron a una llamada la noche del 31 de agosto, reportando a una persona sospechosa en las calles 19 al sur de la Loomis. Dos agentes patrullaban el barrio en un auto sin marcas y llegaron para encontrar a cinco hombres. Uno de ellos era Miguel Vega.

La policía dijo que les dispararon cuando bajaron del auto, y un oficial respondió al fuego, impactando a Miguel en la nuca. Miguel fue transportado al Hospital Stroger, donde más tarde fue declarado muerto.

Tom Ahern, Subdirector de Noticias y Comunicaciones del Departamento de Policía de Chicago (CPD por sus siglas en inglés), tuiteó fotos del arma con la que presuntamente disparó contra la policía.

Pero la familia Vega dice que esa arma fue encontrada a más de 40 pies del cuerpo de Miguel, lo que hace poco probable que fuera suya.

“El departamento de policía todavía no

POR MADISON MULLER TRADUCIDO POR GISELA OROZCO

ha salido y hablado con nosotros sobre lo que realmente sucedió esa noche", dijo Erik.

“Pero, la verdad saldrá tarde o temprano. Los videos de las cámaras corporales saldrán a la luz y mostrarán que mi hermano no lo hizo”.

Sin corroborar las imágenes, la familia no cree el relato de la policía sobre el incidente. También expresaron su decepción por la imagen de Miguel que presentan algunos medios de comunicación, que lo hacen ver como un pandillero que disparó a la policía.

La Oficina Civil de Rendición de Cuentas de la Policía (COPA) dijo que actualmente está revisando las imágenes de las cámaras corporales, así como videos de terceros.

Organizadores de Pilsen Alliance, Comunidades Organizadas Contra la Deportación (OCAD), BYP100, GoodKids MadCity, así como otros, hicieron eco de los sentimientos de Erik: que la seguridad no viene de la policía.

“Sólo han habido doce días este año en los que la policía no ha matado a nadie”, dijo Domincine, un organizador de Pilsen Alliance. “La gente negra y latinx es asesinada en sus propias comunidades”.

(Nota de la editora: Según la base de datos en línea Mapping Police Violence, hasta el 30 de agosto sólo había doce días de lo que va del 2020 en los que la policía en Estados Unidos no utilizó la fuerza mortal).

Después de que hablaran los miembros de la familia, las personas que realizaban danzas aztecas le ofrecieron a la familia un ritual de limpieza y sanación. El mismo grupo bailó en la vigilia de la noche del 2 de septiembre en la Plaza Tenochtitlán.

Alrededor de una hora después del evento, al otro lado de la calle, la policía comenzó a reunirse en grandes números.

Los vehículos de policía marcados y no identificados trajeron a cientos de agentes, y otros llegaron en bicicleta. También asistieron varios oficiales de alto rango, que se distinguen por vestir camisas blancas.

“Queremos mantener esto lo más pacífico posible y mantener a todos a salvo”, dijo Erik antes de que el grupo comenzara

su marcha por la comunidad. “Mi familia no quiere más problemas de los que ya tenemos”.

Alguaciles y abogados del Gremio Nacional de Abogados formaron una barrera entre el grupo y el CPD mientras marchaban hacia el este de la calle 18. La policía bloqueó la mayoría de los caminos en el lado norte de la calle impidiendo que los manifestantes se movieran en dirección al distrito 12 del CPD y del centro.

Mientras marchaban, los manifestantes intercambiaron consignas en inglés y en español. “¿Quién nos mantiene a salvo? ¡Nosotros nos mantenemos a salvo!” “¿Qué queremos? ¡Justicia! ¿Cuándo? ¡Ahora!”

Las tensiones comenzaron a aumentar en la línea entre la policía y los oficiales en bicicleta, pero Betty se apresuró a llamar la atención hacia la familia Vega. “¿Por qué todos se enfrentan a la policía?”, preguntó.

“No estamos aquí para la policía. Estamos aquí por la familia Vega. Alejemos el odio a la policía y mostremos amor a la familia”.

Con la puesta de sol a sus espaldas, los miembros de la comunidad y los organizadores se turnaron en el megáfono para compartir espacio con la familia Vega.

Fred Hampton Jr. —cuyo padre, el presidente de las Panteras Negras de Illinois, Fred Hampton, fue asesinado por la policía de Chicago en 1969— y el concejal de distrito 25, Byron Sigcho-López, se encontraban

entre los oradores que se dirigieron a la multitud.

Alrededor de las 6:45 pm, los organizadores llamaron a la gente a regresar a la Plaza Tenochtitlán para una dispersión segura. De vuelta en la plaza, varios colocaron flores y velas en el suelo en un altar improvisado para Miguel.

Mientras la gente se retiraba, algunos se quedaron para hablar y ofrecer palabras de aliento a la familia Vega. “En realidad acabo de regresar del ejército”, le dijo Erik al Weekly. “Mi abuela dijo que volví por una razón, tal vez es esta”.

“Nunca he conocido a alguien cercano a mí que haya vivido esto. Es la primera vez”, continuó. “Tengo que ser fuerte por mis papás. [Miguel] fue su primogénito”. Nota de la editora: En un esfuerzo continuo para equilibrar la necesidad de información del público contra el potencial de hacer daño a aquellos que luchan por la justicia, el Weekly eligió incluir sólo los nombres de los organizadores de los que no obtuvimos permiso explícito para ser identificados en este artículo.

Madison Muller es residente de Chicago de toda la vida y es estudiante del posgrado en periodismo de justicia social de la Universidad Northwestern. Anteriormente contribuyó fotos de una protesta al Weekly. Puedes encontrar su trabajo de fotoperiodismo en Instagram: @g0ingmad.

SEPTEMBER 16, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

JUSTICE

Standing on Gang Territory

The strategy utilized by undercover police in a known area of conflict is not conducive to reducing crime

BY MATEO ZAPATA

H

ave you seen bloodstains on a sidewalk? An empty plastic bottle of bleach to hold flowers for someone that was killed? An entire block riddled with bullet holes? These are all scenes I witnessed way too often growing up in Pilsen. This was also the scene at 19th and Throop a day after an undercover police officer killed an unarmed man, Miguel Vega, by shooting him in the back of his head.

Miguel was a twenty-six-year-old father, brother, and son, whose family says he wasn't a gang member. But he grew up around people that were in a gang. “I put myself in my son's shoes, I did the same thing. Some of my friends were in gangs,” said his father Miguel Vega Sr. “After school, I hung out with my friends. After work, I hung out with my friends. I never claimed to be in a gang but some of my friends were involved in that life. It’s a part of your barrio.

Your friends are like your family.”

His son was gang-affiliated by association, due to his childhood friendships, yet he didn't have a single placa [tattoo] or criminal record to show for it.

This happened to a lot of us growing up in Chicago. I grew up around a lot of gangaffiliated people too. If you lived on a certain block or one of your friends was in a gang, you had to deal with the possibility of being mistaken by rivals or police for belonging to a gang. As children and youth who grow up witnessing gun violence, police brutality, and constant threats, we’ve never had the space to address our personal problems and post-traumatic stress in healthy ways.

Pilsen is the neighborhood with the most rival gangs I’ve ever seen. Within one and a half miles, the Ambrose, Bishops, Latin Counts, Party People, La Raza, and the Satan Disciples have all had an ongoing conflict for more than thirty years. That's not counting the smaller crews like the Allport

ERIK VEGA. PHOTO BY MATEO ZAPATA

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¬ SEPTEMBER 16, 2020

Lovers, Racine Boys, Cullerton Boys, and Wolcott Boys, which never had aspirations of becoming fully structured gangs, but took up arms, claiming blocks out of a need to feel protected and to avoid being pressured into joining the larger gangs.

These gangs originated as a means to keep unsupervised youth safe while their parents worked, and to concoct a bicultural immigrant and American identity. Due to the lack of extracurricular activities and under-resourced public schools, on top of over-policing, most gangs have lost their original purpose. Most recently, the massive wave of gentrification sweeping through Latinx neighborhoods has destabilized and displaced Pilsen’s youth. Ironically, people tend to associate a neighborhood getting gentrified with it becoming safer and clearly that’s not the case in Pilsen right now.

You might begin to ask yourself how so many gangs mobilized freely in Pilsen for decades. Our former alderman, Danny Solis, did not address the lack of academic and recreational resources, which lead youth to have nothing better to do but to join gangs.

The former alderman was involved in payto-play politics and soliciting prostitution in the North Side, but this is Chicago, so he's freely walking the streets and currently receiving an annual $94,000 pension paid by our tax money. In fact, Solis has more of a criminal record than Miguel Vega ever had, and nobody suggests that he should be shot.

While Solis was collecting developer money, a lot of kids in his ward grew up like Miguel Vega, including me. If you grew up in the streets around here, you know the ins and outs. Some people can tell you the starting five players on the Bulls or the name of every song that plays on a top forty radio station. I can tell you the name of every single corner store and taquería in my neighborhood.

I got a call Tuesday morning, September 1, about an undercover police officer killing a man in my neighborhood and immediately went to the scene. I photographed the bullet holes, bloodstained

concrete, red tape, shattered windows, and La Virgen painted on a wall of a building next to the alley. Miguel Vega's little brother Erik was standing on the sidewalk speaking to reporters. You could see his pain, but he was standing tall, telling reporters his brother was unarmed and murdered by an undercover police officer.

An unsettling flashback hit me as I was holding my camera. About nineteen years ago, almost a lifetime, police carried themselves in a similar reckless paramilitarylike manner. Officer Brian T. Strouse was an undercover police officer who antagonized a group of Ambrose gang members who were hanging out in an alley near 18th Place and Throop—a block away from where Vega was shot. In plain clothes, Strouse threw up a gang sign at the group and was immediately shot dead by a member of the Ambrose gang who thought he was a La Raza member.

Hector Delgado, age sixteen, was arrested and sentenced to life in prison.

Thirty years later, several media outlets have regurgitated the police account that Miguel shot at them and they returned fire.

The Chicago Police Department did not initially state the officers were undercover.

We know CPD has a tendency of rushing to justify police shootings, but it has remained suspiciously silent about this case and has not released any body-cam footage or the name of the undercover officer who killed Miguel Vega.

Eyewitnesses claim that an unmarked car had been parked on the corner of 19th Street and Loomis for about twenty minutes before 911 calls were allegedly made about suspicious activity in the area. Around 10:30pm, the car, with two undercover police officers, peeled out without sirens or flashing lights, accelerating east on 19th. One of the undercover officers tried exiting the car after slamming the brakes and was then shot at by someone. Then both officers exited the vehicle together, firing over twenty shots in the dark, witnesses told me. An undercover officer approached Miguel Vega and killed

PHOTO BY MATEO ZAPATA

“If you lived on a certain block or one of your friends was in a gang, you had to deal with the possibility of being mistaken by rivals or police.” him by firing a single bullet to the back of his head. Miguel was still alive when the ambulance arrived, and it was ten minutes before he was taken to the emergency room.

He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

No evidence from the shootout has been made public by CPD. Two individuals detained at the scene and another two suspects who were pulled over nearby were questioned, but let go that same night.

Nobody present on the 1300 block of West 19th Street was charged with a crime after police claim someone tried to kill them.

The only firearm recovered at the scene was found on the pavement more than forty feet away from Miguel's body.

“Since he can’t speak for himself right now because he’s dead, everyone wants to blame him for everything that happened that night. We want answers, we want justice,” his father said.

Over a hundred people attended the first vigil for Miguel Vega. Prayers were whispered, candles were lit, and flowers were arranged on the sidewalk.

Indigenous ceremonies graced the space and a sahumadora blessed Miguel's parents by cleansing them of negative energies.

The same day as the vigil, CPD issued an internal memo to 12th District police officers warning that La Raza gang had a citywide “conference call” about seeking retaliation against police officers for killing Miguel. These kinds of memos are strictly intended for internal communication, but someone at the 12th District leaked that memo to the press. Afterward, reports came out about police officers' lives being the targets of gangs.

Miguel’s mother, María Vega, organized a vigil the evening of September 2 to demand justice for Miguel.

On September 5, before a rally at Pilsen’s La Plaza Tenochtitlan, CPD returned to 19th and Throop and asked residents if they saw anything the night of the shooting. But why wait more than seventy-two hours to begin asking who saw what a few nights ago? Most neighbors did not seem to trust the officers and didn’t answer any questions.

The Cook County Coroner's office reassured the Vega family that autopsy results would be reported after Labor Day weekend. The family specifically requested a gunshot residue test. But without explanation, the coroner’s office now says it is holding Miguel Vega’s autopsy results for an additional ninety days.

The confrontational strategy utilized by undercover police in a known area of conflict is not conducive to reducing crime.

On the contrary, it incites crime and in some instances takes people's lives. Gang culture

and the existence of gangs is unfortunately ingrained in several communities throughout Chicago as a source of identity and support.

We need to start having a dialogue as inner city residents to explore ways of facilitating de-escalation in areas of constant violence.

We’ve already normalized gun-related deaths due to gang conflicts enabled by trauma, political corruption and disinvestment. Let’s not normalize police profiling and killing people on the vague premise that they’re standing on gang territory. Mateo Zapata is a South Side-raised creative of Colombian/Chilean descent working at the intersection of photojournalism, film, art production and hip-hop. He last contributed photos of solidarity marches to the Weekly.

SEPTEMBER 16, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

JUSTICE

Who Are The Organizers?

Unpacking the lived experiences of those who took to the streets this summer

BY KIA SMITH PHOTOS BY ALLY ALMORE

This piece is part of a series that explores the various perspectives around defunding the police.

T

he air has turned brisk here in Chicago, symbolic like a peace offering after what was a sweltering summer, literally and figuratively. While navigating the global health pandemic of COVID-19, Chicago saw burgeoning social unrest and calls to defund the police, sparked by the deaths of Breonna Taylor in Louisville and George Floyd in Minneapolis, the shootings of Latrell Allen in Englewood and Jacob Blake in Kenosha, and countless instances of police violence against Black people nationwide.

But who are the organizers who took to the streets? What activates the activists?

What drives them to continue to fight for liberation and against state-sanctioned violence?

Alycia Kamille and Hijo Legba of GoodKids MadCity; Damon Williams and Jennifer Pagan of the #LetUsBreathe Collective; Thought Poet of Black Youth Project 100; and Ariel Atkins of the Black Abolitionist Network joined the Weekly on a recent afternoon to discuss the side of protesting that most people don’t know.

Mohawk Johnson, a hip-hop artist accused of assaulting a CPD cop with his skateboard during a protest, joined briefly by phone while on house arrest.

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ÂŹ SEPTEMBER 16, 2020

JENNIFER PAGAN OF THE #LETUSBREATHE COLLECTIVE

What is your unique form of activism? Why did you choose it? Or rather, why do you think it chose you?

Thought Poet: I would say photography or any form documenting of culture is my form of organizing. Because I started with Black Youth Project 100 and now I do a lot of stuff with #LetUsBreathe Collective, not only have I learned about organizing but I’ve also learned why we have the perspectives that we have about abolishing the police, and learning and unlearning about gender politics (like learning how not to be toxic as a cis-hetero person), in documenting all of that is what’s helped me become more grounded and led me to organize.

Damon Williams: It takes many forms, but most of my forms I approach as an educator and facilitator. Within that, I do rap, performance, hosting, lecturing, but it’s all for the work of building a movement, and I think that movement is to transform society.

Jennifer Pagan: A lot of my movement building has come through teaching. I was a classroom teacher for the past two years and a lot of that work for me is organizing. A lot of the work we did in class was empowering students to build community around a problem or an issue and use whatever capacities they had to center their voice to think new things. I really consider myself a cultural worker, so all the work that I do creates, builds, and sustains

DAMON WILLIAMS OF THE #LETUSBREATHE COLLECTIVE

culture. Teaching has really helped me stand in my power and see myself as a creative being.

Ariel Atkins: I help people recognize how powerful they are. A lot of people see activism and organizing and people on the front lines and say, “I can’t do that!” and I help people realize that there are so many other ways that you can be involved. I’m also just really loud and really honest and believe in so much of what I’m doing that it’s really great when you can inspire people to believe in it with you.

Hijo Legba: Black Liberation is a global struggle. Decolonizing as a practice, as a life, as a Black indigenous person, comes through community building, opening up lines of communication across the city, across the world. We don’t always see it that way, but we are all pitted against in the diaspora.

Mohawk Johnson: My music, my painting, my art… I don’t think I chose it, I think it always chose me. I was always angry growing up, and my mom was always giving me stuff to do so I could be less angry. I never stopped being angry, so I used those things as outlets.

Through those outlets, I found the language that helped me articulate what I was feeling and a lot of it was systemic.

SEPTEMBER 16, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

JUSTICE

At what moment in your lives do you think you became radicalized? How did that moment shape you?

TP: There was always rumors on the block that my homie wasn’t killed by the Stones. The GD’s at the time were into it with the Stones, which kept us fighting with each other on 95th, but actually it was a cop that shot him under a viaduct. It took us until last year to find that shit out. It was just funny because at my school everyone learned at that moment what it meant to take care of each other.

MJ: The moment that radicalized me was me being accused of breaking into my own house with my own keys in my hand. I was a junior at Columbia College, just got home, and the cops accused me of breaking in.

DW: Radicalization is a process that is activated through time. I was activated by the Ferguson uprising not only because it was historically significant but also because it was the modernization of rebellion and uprising. We hadn’t seen one in about twenty years, so seeing that in real time is what activated me and not just thinking it and saying and trying to have cool tweets. The moment that provoked my consciousness was when I was seventeen, I was assigned an Angela Davis speech and within the first few minutes she said very plainly, “You can’t be anti-racist without being feminist”. It’s something about the way she said it—as somebody who had grown up with a very pro-Black consciousness, I saw myself as a young child wanting to be a changemaker.

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JP: It’s been a series of awakenings over these past six years or so. When Ferguson first popped off, I was a senior in college at a school two hours south of Ferguson in Columbia.

Once we heard about a Black boy being shot and killed in the street and his body laying there for hours, we decided to do something. That meant me like planning rallies, planning marches, planning die-ins, and all this shit. My second wave of awakening came from teaching, because if you’re doing it right, it impacts you in a way that I can’t even explain.

The third moment came a couple of months ago when I got my ass beat by CPD. Part of me cannot remember that moment. Part of me can’t remember what my body was doing. But I think right now is a moment of cosmic righteousness, and I really think our ancestors are making space for us to receive what is rightfully and truthfully ours. That moment propelled me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I didn’t know that I held strength until I felt that baton in my hand and was able to throw it. You feel 2,000 years in your bones when you experience something like that. It fucking sucks to get your ass beat and it sucks to experience that trauma and to experience that violence when you’re only trying to build a world that is centered on life and love. But it is something that transforms you forever and really makes you want to work towards a world where that type of shit does not exist.

JUSTICE

AA: I think Trayvon Martin woke me up a little bit. But being southern and Black and being six [years old] and seeing your father being put over [the police car] because they think he stole a car because it just couldn’t be his.… Another example, when I was in middle school my mom couldn’t afford to drive me across town, so instead we moved to this suburb called Collierville, which is incredibly white. And we were living in this apartment complex which is surrounded by mansions. I had nightmares every night that the KKK was going to kill us. A month into us living there, some kid set my dad’s car on fire. The flames were so bad that you could see it from the street. My dad came out the next morning and had to be super calm because it’s all white police officers and he can’t be angry because he knows that if he shows any anger, they’re gonna attack him. They still treated him as if he did it because he was “too calm” even though his family was put in danger.

What activated me though was in 2016, PBS dropped this documentary called Vanguard of The Revolution which was about the Black Panther Party, which isn’t that radical now but at that moment it was super radical for me. They get to the part about Fred Hampton and what he did in Chicago with the clinics and the Rainbow Coalition. I remember being six years old and telling my parents that I wanted to start a center that had free food for everybody, not pay rent, people would have job training, people would have free clothes, and open to everybody. Everybody told me that it could not be done and you would have to have a lot of money to make that happen. So watching that documentary, I saw that it already had been done. I cried for hours and I knew that was what I wanted to get back to.

Alycia Kamille: I think it was quite literally living in a juxtaposition of wellness and life. I was able to be in programs like Gallery 37 and then going home to like 63rd and Cottage and I’m seeing no grocery stores. I was coming from downtown to where I live, where it was a drastic difference between resources. It’s like existing is a threat on its own. Recently, seeing the amount of Black death so close to my age too… and it’s like damn, that could’ve been me too.

And then being arrested and beaten by CPD even when we were leaving the space and still being attacked. And then understanding the drastic differences of resources between downtown, my high school of Kenwood, and then my home, seeing and living on one side of privilege and one side of oppression. Seeing that if money’s put here, this will happen, and if love and empathy is put here, this will happen. It’s possible—the money’s there, the resources are there, it’s just not being given. That wakes you up a lot.

HL: I’m not fully radicalized yet. I’ve always held a lot of trauma that is and is not mine. Both of my grandparents overdosed on heroin. But also, my grandfather was the leader of one of the biggest Puerto Rican gangs in Chicago. I know a lot about how this street shit and how this bad life goes, but I’ve also been able to vicariously live through it. Every day, it’s some radical shit in Chicago. Every day waking up and going to school is some radical shit, for Black and brown kids, but for Black kids specifically. It’s not on some youcan-save-everybody shit, but we all can save each other.

SEPTEMBER 16, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

JUSTICE

ARIEL ATKINS OF THE BLACK ABOLITIONIST NETWORK

What have been your experiences getting arrested? What emotions come up for you?

AK: I think that the whole [August 15th] action was just a lot to take in. I haven't really processed it, just because our intentions of even going to that action was not even the way it ended. So even just going to someplace to demand justice, like supporting and planning on leaving and then, like, we ended up having to quickly take over the action and do lastminute organizing—it was just a lot of stuff, anxiety wise. And I think the part where our group was separated and the kettling started to happen was also just something that I don't think I've even processed what that even felt like at the moment to literally see as my friends get separated.

I was walking out and they were searching you for, I guess like if you had something on you, a weapon.... They didn't even say, or specify what they were doing a search for. They were just searching people. And I was walking past and the officer grabbed me to search me again. And I told him to back off. And then he started cursing me out. And then I just heard, like, “You're under arrest.” And like, six officers grabbed me. Hijo Legba ended up getting arrested because he got on top to just make sure I wasn't beaten up, even though we both still were… I was brought over to the line where they take you in and they kept calling us prisoners.

They put us [with] like eighteen people in one cell, so you couldn’t social distance even if you wanted to. I didn't talk to a lawyer until ten hours later. And even then when they first brought me in to talk to somebody, I waited in the room for like thirty minutes. And then they're like, oh, yeah, he left. He'll be back shortly. It was a lot… Actually going through it is definitely something different than just thinking, oh yeah, I can go into an action and possibly get arrested. Actually getting arrested and especially how aggressive it was was just something like… you can’t even prepare yourself to experience that.

THOUGHT POET OF BLACK YOUTH PROJECT 100

ALYCIA KAMILLE OF GOODKIDS MADCITY

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AA: I was arrested at the [ July] 17th action, which is the Columbus statue, Black and Indigenous Solidarity action. And just that whole day, just the brutality was—the level of it was unexpected. The brutality itself wasn't, but the level of it was totally unexpected.

We were still there trying to get somebody’s things. And the cops were super angry because my way of making sure that people can get out is like it's like, “All right, y'all pay attention to me so that people can get shit. I'm just gonna talk about how ugly your shoes look and how you look stupid as fuck in this uniform. And you could quit your job and you would not be here dealing with all this shit.” We're getting ready to get people like the last group of people to leave and the cops ... I don't know. I guess they got angry. One of them knocked my megaphone out of my hands. And then somebody grabbed it for me. And a cop comes out. He's like “If they don't leave in the next few minutes, everybody here gets arrested.” So I'm getting ready to tell everybody. Oh, let's get out. Let's go. Like, whatever it is, it doesn't matter anymore.” And as I'm getting ready to say that this cop goes fucking arrest her, and there are are cops, there are bikes in front of me. And they reached over and snatched me over the bikes.

And I just remember [being like], “Well, this is it. I'm being slammed to the ground.”

[We were] walked to a truck and put in a truck with other people. And there's a girl who’s saying, like, “I have seizures when I'm stressed out. You guys took my bag.” She was a medic and she just got out of the action. She was trying to help somebody and they took her bag.

And she's like, “My shit is in my bag. Like, I'm afraid I'm gonna have a seizure. I really, really want my medicines if anything happens.”

It just made me more angry and reminded me why we are doing this work. Like, If I'm getting arrested for fighting for rights, knowing that there are people that are being thrown in just for being Black, just for being angry, just for being hungry… like even being in there in a cell [at 51st and Wentworth] next to someone who is obviously going through withdrawal and is like crying and screaming, and they're just not even paying attention to her.

JP: My first experience of police abuse was at a protest for Laquan McDonald somewhere downtown. I can't remember where I was, but me and Damon ended up getting pinned under some bikes, and we were beaten pretty badly by these cops with bikes who were using their bikes as weapons. And I think the craziest part of that experience with police abuse is that we were at the fucking 7-Eleven after we experienced all of that, and the same officer who had us pinned under his bike and was using his bike as a weapon, walked in and smiled at us. So, you know, it was just a complete... disregard for, like, the impact and the violence on people's bodies. The fact that he was able to smile after all of that and enter a space in that way without even recognizing us was really jolting for me.

HIJO LEGBA OF GOODKIDS MADCITY

TP: I've always been the photographer in the movement. So to go from that to organizing to getting arrested and have my face pushed in the cement [on May 31] to sitting in a cell with Damon to us seeing each other’s experiences… and we’re still here, trying to push this shit. That moment changed me into something I was not before. Before, I was afraid to take up space. Now I’m not anymore.

Thinking locally first, what does an ideal Chicago look like for you? Thinking globally, what does an ideal world look like to you?

TP: We truly are coming from all different sides of Chicago, coming from different experiences, different everything. But it's like everything in one space is creating something brilliant. All of this shit that's happening right now is brilliant. But when you ask what’s my ideal Chicago? Clearly no police. Clearly putting those $2 billion [from the police budget] into the park districts, into the afterschool programs. Like you put that money into Chicago, all the positive shit, that footwork, like the art—if that money is taken from the police department and put into the city itself, which means that would happen with the rest of the world, which means that the police wouldn’t exist no more. So when you say what’s an ideal world, ideal city—no police.

AA: What Chicago is doing right now. I think a lot about the night of the 31st when Lightfoot and CPS were like “no more food for the kids!” and the city stepped up. Everybody was just like “fuck you, we’ll feed the kids!” and more tables were popping up. More people were figuring out how to help others grow their own food, how to help people eat, putting up testing sites for COVID, offering rides to one another.

And I think we showed that we do take care of each other. We take care of us. And we've shown more and more that these police and these politicians—we don't really need them and that they're here for nothing. I have not stopped thinking about the little girl that was killed this week [Ed. Dajore Wilson, age eight, who was killed September 7 in a driveby shooting] and how the police show up afterward and they do this press conference saying, “We're looking for...this truck and blah blah blah.” And it's like, you have no purpose. You couldn't even stop it from happening. In fact, what you do is you take all of the money that is needed to help communities and to heal our trauma and to deal with this shit. And you just hoard it and then you blame us for what we're doing to each other. Well actually, what the system is doing to us. I believe that an ideal Chicago would be just us taking care of each other and figuring it out.

I’m from the South and my big momma, everybody talks about her, how she fed everybody on the street, everybody. If there was something that was going on in somebody's house, they would go to that person's house. If Man-Man was beating on his wife, everybody would show up and be like, “Look, you beat her. Either you gonna leave or you're gonna stop beating her. And like, we're gonna figure this out and we're gonna take care of her. You got to go.” But it would end. It would stop. There was no violence. It was all love. It was everybody taking care of each other and figuring things out without police, without the state. The ideal world that we want exists. It exists in all kinds of communities. And we're just told constantly that it can't exist, that it's not possible, but it is fully possible. We just have to believe in that and we have to believe in the power that we have to make it happen and believe that we are strong enough.

DW: My ideal Chicago, an ideal world, is first a world where we collectively take the responsibility to make sure all life has what it needs to survive and then develop it. We talk about human beings, develop our humanity. So when I say survive, every human being requires shelter, requires nutrition, requires medical care to be able to sustain life. And we live in a system where every day people make the choice to ensure that folks don't have that.

I believe this is true about Chicago, but I know this truth that the United States of America is not a problem of scarcity. There are more vacant and abandoned and unused units of housing than there are homeless people. We throw away more food than it will require to end hunger. Money is not real, but we produce and generate enough money for everyone to have enough to be able to purchase if purchasing is the way that we need to acquire goods for survival…. And so, you know, [in Chicago] and then everywhere that the world I envision my abolitionist future, no matter where I'm living or calling home, I am always within walking distance of the institutions I need to provide my needs.

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So if I need shelter, there is a place within walking distance that ensures that everyone in that community [has shelter], and within that, we can address harm. So if you're in an abusive dynamic, either the person who is committing harm or the person who is being harmed has someone to go to to make sure that at least you have somewhere to sleep, and then we can resolve the conflict. So much of the violence we see is because people's living situation is precarious, right? Everybody should be within walking distance of a source of free food. So whether that's a garden or that's food distribution, whether that's mutual aid, it’s healthy, not processed food that sustains the body. And then everybody should also be within walking distance of a medical facility.

Generally, we think every kid should be within walking distance of a school. Every kid should be within walking distance of a library. Every kid should be walking distance of a park. I think expanding that notion.

When I see police, I see 100 other jobs smashed into one thing with a gun. So we need somebody that monitors traffic. We need someone that responds to domestic assault. We need someone who responds if there's a dispute in a store or someone's taken things. We need something if there's a party that's too loud. But those are 100 different things. And so the world that I see is investing in all of those things instead of trying to shrink it into a budget item and make it what's most cost-effective because violence has been proven to be the greatest seed capital for investment.

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So that's my world, where we have everything we need within walking distance. We don't have borders and we don't force our politics into a gun. We force it into cultural, social relationships rooted in love and rooted in abundance. Kia Smith is a writer by purpose and author by passion, who asks the hard questions while creating safe spaces for people to be vulnerable. She writes for the Chicago Defender. This is her first piece for the Weekly.

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From Bohemia to The Black Arts Movement Two recent books make clear how the fate of the cultural cutting edge in Chicago has depended on urban space ILLUSTRATION BY THUMY PHAN

BY BENJAMIN GINZKY

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institutions. The struggle of those socially and politically engaged Black artists poses still-relevant questions about cultural production against the grain in a segregated, post-industrial metropolis.

n 1967, when Black Power activists occupied part of Washington Park and renamed it “Malcolm X Shabbazz Park,” artists from the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) were in attendance. They were there not just as fellow activists or to simply lend their techniques to a propaganda stunt. In her book Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975, art historian Rebecca Zorach says they were “claiming space.”

The occupation resulted in clashes and arrests, and it was an instructive experience for the OBAC members, who in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement (BAM) and beyond consciously deployed their artistic practices for social transformation on a terrain of contested public space.

Zorach’s is one of two relatively recent works that make clear how the fate of the cultural cutting edge has depended on such configurations and refigurations of Chicago’s urban space. Keith M. Stolte’s Chicago Artist Colonies surveys the dedicated spaces for artists and freethinkers that popped up from the late nineteenth century until around World War II. This historical background provides an interesting context to Zorach’s story, which largely depicts alternative spaces after the decline of this bohemia.

Reading the two together shows how twentieth-century Chicago worked as a home for groundbreaking art. The growth of artist colonies reflects the initial interactions of commerce and creativity, of elites and avant-gardes, that built Chicago’s institutional fine art scene. The history of the Black Arts Movement, like the earlier bohemia, is one of artists, in tandem with radical socio-political developments, claiming space and building their own

Chicago’s Bohemia

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tolte maps the emergence of numerous small-scale artist colonies in the 1890s, in the penumbra of the elite cultural stomping grounds where artists sought patronage. Later, commercial ambition spurred the assembly of artists in spaces like Tree Studios and the Fine Arts Building, which took on the character of “colonies” as a critical mass of artists participated in salons and club activities.

The Fine Arts Building originally served an established “triumvirate” of turnof-the-century Chicago artists (painters Oliver Dennett Grover and Ralph Elmer Clarkson and sculptor Lorado Taft), but subsequently incubated artists and literati who pushed beyond academic painting and society patronage. Harriet Monroe published the journal Poetry from inside the Fine Arts Building beginning in 1912, breaking ground by publishing Carl Sandburg. Fellow tenant Margaret Anderson published defining works of twentieth-century literature, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, in The Little Review.

Beyond these elite studio spaces, turnof-the-century Chicago hosted a wider bohemia characterized by radicalism and independence. Old society mansions were converted into rooming houses in the area around the old pre-fire Water Tower— now the site of flagship luxury retail establishments on “The Magnificent Mile.”

During World War I, a subculture of autodidactic hobos and revolutionaries emerged in “Towertown,” which Stolte describes as “an oasis of racial, ethnic, cultural, and sexual diversity.” The Dil Pickle Club there— founded by “hobohemian” and former mine worker Jack Jones as a forum for syndicalist speeches—became defined by welcoming anyone who was “a nut about anything.”

Sandburg became a regular, and one could catch one-act plays by Theodore Dreiser and Edna Ferber.

This cross-pollination, the heady buzz of a happening “scene,” is more than incidental.

Stolte singles out the phenomenon as the essence of the artist colony or bohemian district. Further, he argues that the haunts of today’s young “creatives” “lack the fraternal intimacy or collaborative interaction” that characterized the earlier colonies. He’s not the only one: analyses like Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals point to structural changes in the American city and society to explain what Jacoby saw as the intellectual underachievement of his Baby Boom generation. Jacoby marks the decline

starting with the loss of the cheap rents in urban bohemias such as Towertown, which had enabled artists to access the city and its resources, and more, to collaborate (and compete) with others in the same game.

The urban transformation chronicled by critics such as Jacoby and Jane Jacobs would claim Towertown as well as the 57th Street artist colonies, studio spaces developed in a disused concession building remaining from the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and gradually populated by members of the Fine Arts Building community in the 1910s.

Once home to principals of Chicago’s literary world, including Ben Hecht, Harriet Monroe, and Floyd Dell and his wife Margery Currey, who fostered something of a kingdom of free love and salon conversation, the studios were destroyed as part of the Hyde Park urban renewal project spearheaded by the University of Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s. Seeking to achieve a “stable,” racially integrated and affluent neighborhood, this “renewal,” like similar efforts around the country, resulted in the expulsion of poor Black residents

Zorach’s chief argument is that for the Black Arts Movement artists, Chicago communities were more than objects of representation and social comment, as social realism might pose them, but participating components of the artists’ projects.

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and the loss of the artist colony, as well as more than twenty taverns on 55th Street, Woodlawn’s blues clubs, and dozens of Black small businesses.

The Black Arts Movement

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he roots of the ’60s Black Arts Movement lie in the same period of urban transformation that encompassed urban renewal and the rise and fall of the earlier bohemia. Hundreds of thousands of Black migrants from the south arrived in several waves before and after World War II—and until 1948, racist restrictive housing covenants and other forms of discrimination kept them concentrated in a South Side “Black Belt” and a West Side ghetto where homes were subdivided and increasingly unlivable.

This situation inspired Black cultural efforts that addressed oppressive social conditions and took part in movements to change them, including the “social realism” of artists such as Charles White and Margaret Burroughs, whom Zorach singles out as a figure linking this era to the later BAM. Zorach’s chief argument is that for the BAM artists, Chicago communities were more than objects of representation and social comment, as social realism might pose them. The neighborhood and street could be art material, gallery, and critical forum, and the people of “the community” were the subject depicted, the audience, the critics, and the collaborators in the artists’ projects.

When Black Chicagoans finally had the chance to move out of the old “Black Belt,” they were met with collapsing or hostile public resources in their new neighborhoods.

Black Chicago Public Schools students were forced into portable classrooms known pejoratively as “Willis Wagons” (after CPS superintendent Benjamin C. Willis). Police violence was routine, and a struggle for true open housing occupancy went on for decades, culminating in Martin Luther King’s 1967 Chicago Freedom Movement campaign.

In the context of domestic assassinations and international decolonization, activist agendas shifted from Civil Rights to Black Power, a capacious slogan that signaled the unleashing of attempts at community self-determination. Black artists responded with efforts to not only portray and protest ongoing oppression, but also to launch artistic experiments in making something new for and with Black people.

Zorach points to The Wall of Respect, 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

a collaborative Black history mural at 43rd and Langley in Bronzeville that anticipated similar murals in many American cities today, as the inception of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago. It was an initiative of the OBAC, first organized in 1966–67 to unite “cultural workers.” The Wall’s array of “Black heroes” provided alternatives for Black people in neighborhoods where billboards and mass media still mostly displayed white images. Moreover, the Wall made the corner a new kind of place, “turn[ing] the street into a public forum for poetry, music, theater, and political rallies.”

The site for the Wall was chosen in part because the chief artist, Bill Walker, lived nearby and had a rapport with the predominant local street gangs. The artists had to continually negotiate with the Blackstone Rangers and other gangs so they wouldn’t be run off the block.

BAM artists took an active interest in the gangs as a social problem, a folk practice, and potentially more. Zorach quotes OBAC member Jeff Donaldson as claiming the concept of the Wall of Respect was “an adoption and an extension of the turf-identifying graffiti scrawled on neighborhood buildings by Chicago street gangs.” This interest in criminal aesthetics parallels the overall ’60s interest in the selfdetermination and ingenuity of the guerilla.

But a more common perspective was that street crime was a misdirection of the numbers and organization apparent among the gangs. Some artistic projects tried to bring this energy to new outlets; Oscar Brown Jr. actually enlisted the Stones in 1967 as the chorus for a revue titled Opportunity Please Knock. This served to keep “kids off the street” but was itself a venue for a militant mood: the chorus went on to release a record expressing skepticism of Civil Rights Movement freedom rhetoric.

In this context, it’s worth observing how the venues of the old, white Chicago bohemia engaged the “otherness,” and indeed criminality, of their day. The Dil Pickle Club was in large part constituted by people almost universally regarded as menaces: hobos and labor radicals. Their railway “tramping” was, of course, illegal, and labor organizing was criminal or as good as criminal in much of the country.

As a space, the Dil Pickle was anarchic and self-determined. It didn’t try to redirect or reform.

Phil Cohran’s Affro-Arts Theater, at Pershing and Drexel, then, might be more in the spirit of the Pickle than other forms of

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1960s “community art.” The theater served not only as an incubator where artists, such as Earth, Wind and Fire frontman Maurice White, got their start, but as an intellectual center for conferences and debate. Cohran embraced the cosmic capaciousness of his mentor Sun Ra, and Affro-Arts had a curriculum of classes ranging from Black history to natural eating and gender roles.

But in 1968, Affro-Arts closed following police raids, municipal harassment, and a court summons for Cohran. Like Walker and Brown Jr., Cohran had built relationships with the Stones. But the period in the later ’70s and early ’80s, after the theater closed and the remnants of the Stones became the El Rukns, saw them become a more threatening presence in the neighborhood, with the theater building actually becoming the clubhouse for gang founder Jeff Fort and his lieutenants at the peak of their deadly involvement in the heroin trade. It was the city’s paranoia about incipient Black radicalism that led it to shut down Cohran, and that destruction of space for autonomy and culture opened the doors to more destructive forms of “autonomy” later on, namely that of gangs.

A “Black Aesthetic”

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lack artists, inside the Black Arts Movement and out, have borne a special burden that has influenced artistic form and content. In his treatment of two waves of Black Chicago visual arts, Murray DePillars shows how, on the one hand, early white Chicago audiences wondered why a Black painter would join contemporaries in pursuing postimpressionist landscapes instead of exploring his supposed “jungle origins.” But for their own part, generation after generation of Black artists have seen the need to provide images of and for Black people that counter degrading ones generated by the white mainstream.

Among those artists making Black images, a further dichotomy remains, exemplified by the work of Walker and a fellow member of the collective AFRICOBRA, Barbara Jones-Hogu.

Walker followed the Wall of Respect with the Wall of Truth, shifting from depicting ideals and role models to sharing “hard truths” about the conditions in the community, including intracommunity violence and exploitation. Jones-Hogu, on the other hand, shifted from protest images to “positive” ones offering visions of life

and values in a liberated Black community.

Zorach attributes this shift to her move from academic settings with white audiences to a more radical “nation-building” milieu.

All these issues were coming to a head at the time depicted in Art for People’s Sake.

In his 1967 Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, a complex, influential, and often perplexing polemic that guided many in the Black Power moment, Harold Cruse made a case for Black cultural production, brought forth in Black-controlled institutions. OBAC cofounder Hoyt Fuller, as described in Jonathan Fenderson’s recent Building the Black Arts Movement, was an interlocutor of Cruse.

Fenderson attributes to both men a Black nationalism in the cultural front, focusing on “forward-looking creative production, criticism, and institutional control, not African American social behavior, ethical mores, or a reclamation of past beliefs.”

Cruse criticized DuBois, the NAACP, and Black leftists for (among other things) alienation from the Black business base that he thought would be necessary for institutional independence and endurance—but in the Black Arts Movement, he saw potential to transcend that. In Chicago, Fuller worked diligently at Johnson Publishing. Against the grain of his controversy-shy employer, one of the city’s foremost Black business enterprises, he used his editorial perch to provide a forum for Black arts and nationalism, modeling the approach Cruse advocated.

With OBAC, Fuller advocated what he called a “black aesthetic.” Fuller pointed out that the idea that “black is beautiful” expressed in the youthful upsurge of ghetto rebellion was an aesthetic principle. Black artists could draw on the “distinctive styles and rhythms and colors of the ghetto” and the “cool” of Black performers. Black critics could study these qualities to escape the “irrelevant” criteria of white values and liberal integration.

Along with artists and critics, though, the third necessary element in a cultural dynamic is audience. In this, the BAM aimed to connect art and community. Larry Neal opened his 1968 essay “The Black Arts Movement” with the statement that the movement is “opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community.” And the relationship between art and community is the standard Zorach sets for her treatment of the movement in her title, subtitle, and introduction.

In Art for People’s Sake we do get vivid looks into community engagement with

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the BAM, especially when it comes to the Wall of Respect—Zorach focuses on the children of the neighborhood who made the Wall their own, posing to give Black power fists and charging a quarter for tours and explanations of the artwork. This is a welcome addition to the well-researched chronicle of the intellectual, artistic, and organizational dynamic of Chicago’s BAM artist protagonists. Zorach’s use of thirty interviews conducted with BAM participants primarily over the last ten years, on top of her archival work and sensitivity to Chicago’s broader cultural and social context, are valuable, first for creating a record of the movement, and further giving readers a window into the relations of personalities in the movement. But the breadth implied by “community” necessitates other methods for evaluating the BAM. Zorach thus looks to media strategies deployed by Black activists in Chicago, such as the opening of Black Panther Fred Hampton’s apartment to both TV crews and community tours after his murder by Chicago police. She quotes a journalist describing the site becoming “a combination shrine and political education center,” making vivid how Black communities related to the struggle through both sites and images. It is interesting to think about the aesthetic and formal dimensions of the Panthers’ decisions. But such strategies are vulnerable to Cruse’s critique that they remain ephemeral, especially compared to institutions, which provide continuous networks, patronage, and education.

An answer to Cruse here comes from James Hall, who argued in an essay in Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Reconsidered that the avant-garde jazz musicians of the post-war period were intellectuals in their own right. The practice of musicians like Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane directly countered the existing capitalist production and distribution of jazz, demonstrating that time-based media like music, film, and performance can have social impact in their own way, even as they interact with site-based art and cultural institutions.

In Chicago, Phil Cohran is an interesting example of this intersection. He ran the cultural site of Affro-Arts, but it was his musical output and the “happening” around it that most dramatically served as a “public prose” with nation-building impact.

Cohran performed a series of weekly concerts at 63rd Street Beach where, in his words, “Chicago became Black.” At the end of this

street—once Chicago’s largest commercial district, home to the Illinois Central station that brought Great Migration arrivals to Chicago—dashikis and natural hair became regular sights.

This is the clearest testament to the importance of the Black Arts Movement: even when individual works or institutions did not last, the movement provided space for Black community expression and experimentation. Its legacy is felt from hip-hop to the literal background in major U.S. cities: the distinctive socially conscious urban murals in Black neighborhoods can be traced to the era that kicked off with the now-eradicated Wall of Respect.

In the book’s conclusion, rather than looking forward to phenomena like further muralism or hip-hop that harken back to the BAM, Zorach makes a similar move to Hall, refashioning what “counts” as artistic or intellectual production. “To fully consider the poorest and most oppressed members of the community as makers of art would require a redefinition of what constitutes art,” but a redefinition, she adds, “that went further than most of the artists in the movement would be willing to go.”

“What if the urban uprisings known as ‘riots,’ ” she asks, “could themselves be

understood as a gesture of creation instead of mere wanton destruction?” This provocative line of questioning is newly relevant in 2020.

Zorach examines the general interaction of rioters and the media through the individual act of a Black boy photographed in 1968 painting an ephemeral “black power” graffiti with shaving cream—the reader sees the conscious actors behind spectacular action in the “street,” and can appreciate them as aestheticians.

Taking theory and practice of the BAM seriously, though, should encourage us to look beyond what makes it into the media and evaluate our present moment by what’s going on in spaces (from the Weekly’s home at the Experimental Station, to the Black radical “oasis” The Breathing Room, to “happenings” like Charles Preston’s #ChurchOnThe9) where autonomy is being built. Broader forces of capitalism and racism are still shaping the urban environments where struggle takes place, as well. The same moment that brings hope for social transformation also means a lot of uncertainty for the fragile institutional life of Black Chicago communities where any such change will unfold.

In Art For People’s Sake, Zorach has done extremely important work documenting

a movement and bringing its concerns, dynamics, and ambitions to life. This commitment to showing the Chicago Black Arts Movement on its own terms and in its historic place might leave Weekly readers wanting some comment on the particular legacy of the Black Arts Movement for Black life and activism in Chicago today. In addition to Art For People’s Sake, readers are advised to check out Zorach’s 2014 edited Art Against the Law, which anthologizes Mariame Kaba, Joyce Owens, members of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project, and others. Rebecca Zorach, Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965–1975. $29.95. Duke University Press.

416 pages Keith M. Stolte, Chicago Artist Colonies. $21.99. The History Press. 208 pages Benjamin Ginzky is a law student at ChicagoKent and lives in Hyde Park, where he is a docent at the Oriental Institute and involved with the 57th Street Meeting of Friends. He also edits nonfiction at Mouse Magazine.

ILLUSTRATION BY THUMY PHAN

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VISUAL ARTS

Painting the World of COVID-19 Artists at Project Onward are destigmatizing developmental disabilities— and during a global pandemic, they are also building an online community

BY JOCELYN VEGA

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ack in February, everyone at Project Onward’s studio shifted from their workstations and huddled for a group meeting to discuss the novel coronavirus possibly appearing in the United States.

Then, the details of COVID-19 were highly unknown, but the disability arts organization’s artists and staff tried to address the uncertainty of what might come.

Some artists, wishing for the best, hoped that the Bridgeport studio, open for sixteen years, wouldn’t shut down, even if the artists had access to materials at home.

Half a year later, the studio’s workstations have long been still, but its artistic capacity is far from that.

As a studio and gallery space, Project Onward’s mission is to support the emotional wellbeing and growth of professional artists with developmental disabilities and mental health needs, through free artist-in-residence and art entrepreneurship programs. Project Onward not only addresses professional barriers its

often marginalized members face to work in artistic fields, but it also removes cost barriers for artists who are low income.

Each member artist is given studio access with gallery space, art supplies to maintain their unique portfolios, and individualized mentorship. With what Project Onward describes as their “visual voice[s],” member artists are destigmatizing mental illness and developmental disabilities—and during a global pandemic, they are also building an online community by developing programming to approach and reflect with artists.

With a staff of five, this nonprofit has kept going to support its fifty artists. The studio has curated several online exhibitions, events, and weekly artist highlights while navigating the stress of keeping their virtual doors open. Project Onward transitioned from global uncertainty to microconsistency by centering artists’ presence and the connections between art and life in virtual spaces.

"COVID-19", BY ALLEN MCNAIR, COURTESY OF PROJECT ONWARD

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In the introduction to its current “Cause and Affect” exhibition, the studio stated, “Project Onward has a distinct relationship to the events of 2020. The neurodiverse nature of our artist community greatly impacts their perceptions of and responses to national and global crises....Our artists have chosen to document and comment on both the extremity of what has passed this year and what they hope the rest of the year can bring.” “[There is a] love to make artwork and the need to make artwork and to show people how talented these artists are....

Their work is just as great as anything on the commercial level of art today or fine arts in Chicago,” said Robyn Jablonski, Project Onward’s studio manager for the past nine years.

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hen visiting the studio before COVID-19, you could see workstations or “cubbies” that mirrored each artist’s unique and contrasting styles, like Elizabeth Barren’s glamorous mixed media and Blake Lenoir’s zigzagged color pencils on their desks. There was Sereno Wilson pouring cascading amounts of green glitter, and Fernando Ramirez holding sharp eye contact with his ongoing piece, and Julius Bautista painting in an electric realist style. You might also have met Ryan Tepich in the kitchen; Safiya Hameed, known as the “Princess of Project Onward”; or Franklin Armstrong, described as “our news man” for his penchant for sharing the daily news, walking along the busy studio space.

Together, the artists were tracing knowledge through artistic windows connecting their world to others. From the compassionate exchange of ideas between artists asking for advice from their studio neighbors to laughter from conversations, Project Onward’s not just facilitating the production of art—it’s also building a community.

Many of the artists are self-taught, and they have come to Project Onward from a multitude of lived experiences. Before

joining Project Onward in 2008, Tony Davis sold drawings outside Union Station that interpreted “his own life” in the Chicago Housing Authority’s ABLA Homes development on the West Side. Some artists have known each other their entire lives, like the Juguilon brothers, or grammar school best friends David Holt and Jackie Cousins Oliva.

Many artists have also maintained a partnership/life journey with art that started in their youth, as a way of processing their experiences. “I started drawing because I didn’t know how to say what I thought. I was only three years old, and the blue ink pen was the only thing I could find after a traumatic event,” said Keturah Lynn in her artist bio.

David Hence said, “I don't mind sharing my sketchbook because I think it’s my way to express myself....It helps me be in the moment.”

Other artists, like Paul Kowalewski and Allen McNair, describe art as more like its own being, composed from their thoughts or dreams. “I’ll start something, and it won’t necessarily end up the way I was thinking. It takes on a life of its own,” said Kowalewski.

As a community, Project Onward reinforces an artist’s individual affinities and helps them have collective impact. The artists’ backgrounds and studio relationships work together to encourage passionate direction in affirming bold paths.

Art made by artists with minimal or no training is often labeled as “outsider art” due to its distance from the mainstream art world and its institutions. As a term, “outsider artist” is understood as positively reflecting an individual with multifaceted potential but without formal artistic training. But this term also risks marginalizing artists who lack institutional privilege. Project Onward artists navigate this tension as both an opportunity to address exclusion and to expand distinction.

“Project Onward looks to question, if not always answer, and challenge what

VISUAL ARTS

the next step in this genre of art will be moving forward. We mean to open a visual dialogue with the viewer in hopes that more questions and curiosity about these forms of art emerge,” said Project Onward Executive Director Nancy Gomez at the nonprofit’s “Outsider Connections” virtual panel discussion in June.

Artists are not waiting for an external answer. Many are leading their own outsider art narratives through their work—most envisioning possibilities by looking inward during the global pandemic. In Project Onward’s weekly “Artists at Home” interview program (started during the pandemic), many have talked about their individual perspectives. In his interview, Dijon Barrett described a current unfinished piece as imagining “what’s going to happen after the pandemic”; artist Luke Shemroske similarly talked about how his “Virus in the street” piece highlights how artists are uniquely witnessing the pandemic in their own lives.

“Sometimes, in some pieces, I’m just working things out, for myself...and to allow other people to have a glimpse into how some of those things feel for me and for people in similar situations,” said Cheryelle Booker during her artist interview.

Project Onward artists like Barrett, Shemroske, and Booker are expanding artistic recognition for neurodiversity.

They do so across artistic realms and through worlds that orbit each other to collectively shape a universe of meanings and possibilities.

In “Cause and Affect,” the artists provided a portal to cross virtual bridges to “still question, hope, believe and fight for a more just, peaceful, and healing nation and world.” Paintings range from “Christopher Columbus Takedown” by Janno Juguilon, to Molly McGrath’s self-portrait “Trying to Fight Covid-19” and Alfred Banks’s “Black Girls Rock,” reflecting struggles and transformations.

In this and earlier online exhibitions, one can see the extent of Project Onward’s engagement and creativity in these past months alone. “Repeat Repeat Repeat” explored the spectrum of responses to repetition as either a meditative process to create predictable outcomes or as an “act of compulsion”; “Wild and Beautiful” asked audiences sheltering at home to imagine “things beyond our four walls.”

“We should appreciate those other points of view or other visions of the world, especially as far as the aesthetic of

the artwork. Nothing has to fit a particular mold,” said Jablonski.

Despite success and growth, challenges remain for Project Onward; a particular concern has been how to stay connected with artists during the pandemic despite the digital divide for communities with developmental disabilities. “No wifi. No Internet. No smartphone,” said artist Ricky Willis during a recent interview with NBC 5 Chicago. For Michael Hopkins, his difficulty is not simply missing tools but lacking the familiarity to use the ones he has. In the NBC story, when asked about his computer, he said, “I don’t know how to work it, no way.” Currently, Project Onward hopes to distribute technology to more of its artists through an arrangement with Apple.

As Project Onward works to support artists without access to technology, they are also addressing social isolation. In July, the team started weekly group calls where, as staff said in a Facebook post, “Everyone was

so happy and excited to see each other’s face and catch up.”

The overnight switch to remote programming symbolically marks Project Onward’s second location change as an organization after moving out of its original location and into Bridgeport Art Center during 2013.

To prepare for this physical relocation, Jablonski joined Project Onward to support artists to adjust to this new environment and help artists who experienced additional challenges. Her background in behavioral health supported relationship building through mutual understanding and supportive environments for the past seven years. Now as then, as an organization, supportive relationships and a safe environment have kept Project Onward going during uncertainty.

“It’s funny because you're not just in a straight path, going forward all the time, right?” Jablonski said in February. “It’s

called Project Onward, but you’re not going in a straight path....it’s change you cannot predict.”

Now, in 2020, Project Onward is working with artists within their homes to craft a new beginning from years of strong foundations. And the participating artists continue to creatively interpret the overwhelming disorientation of the past six months to build their artistic worlds.

The full list of Project Onward’s artists and their biographies are available on Project Onward’s website. Artworks are also available to purchase to support artists and maintain high-quality art supplies. For more on Project Onward, such as donating, volunteering, or purchasing artwork, please visit projectonward.org. Jocelyn Vega is a first-generation Latina. She is a contributing editor at the Weekly and last wrote about the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless’s census advocacy.

ARTWORK BY DAVID HENCE, COURTESY OF PROJECT ONWARD

SEPTEMBER 16, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23

ENVIRONMENT

Opinion: Hellco

Not what Little Village residents envisioned for the Crawford site

“Little Village residents organized for more than twelve years to shut down the coal plant. So why did the City of Chicago hijack this project against the established wishes of residents and organizers?”

BY JOSÉ ACOSTA-CÓRDOVA

O

n April 11, 2020, Hilco Redevelopment Partners and its contractors botched the implosion of a smokestack at the former Crawford Coal Plant, sending a cloud of volatile dust into the sky that settled on hundreds of homes and backyards in the Little Village community. This was alarming to many community members, elected officials, and city agencies, who were shocked to see the negligence unfold before their eyes. Hilco’s proposed development should never have been approved in the first place. Little Village residents organized for more than twelve years to shut down the coal plant, and did so successfully with local and national support, envisioning a future of community-building, educational, and job training space in its place. So why did the City of Chicago hijack this project against the established wishes of residents and organizers?

Little Village has historically been an industrial neighborhood due to its location along the Sanitary and Ship Canal. The canal replaced the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1900, and was built for two main purposes: 1. to allow the reversal of the Chicago River and to move sewage runoff away from Lake Michigan, the city’s main source of drinking water; and 2. to move barges and ships from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River.

Over the twentieth century, heavy industry was developed along the banks of the canal in order to capitalize on the access to water and adjacent railroads.

Currently situated near the canal are oil and gas facilities, asphalt plants, construction companies, waste management facilities, industrial packaging and container manufacturing, and Trucking, Distribution, and Logistics (TDL) facilities. These industries all contribute significantly to the poor air quality in Little Village and surrounding neighborhoods. Although it connects to the Chicago River, it is a human-made industrial canal with severely polluted water.

24 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

For over a decade, the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) has advocated for a Just Transition—meaning a transition away from a fossil-fuel extractive-based economy to a regenerative-based economy—to happen at the seventy-two-acre site of the former Crawford coal plant. Referred to as “cloud factories” by youth who tried to describe the pollution, the plant’s smokestacks filled the skies of Little Village with toxic emissions for generations, while coal dust settled onto houses and school grounds. Residents of all ages were suffering high rates of asthma, bronchitis, and many other respiratory illnesses. A Harvard study conducted in 2001 linked more than fortyone premature deaths, 550 emergency room visits, and 2,800 asthma attacks every year with toxic emissions from Crawford as well as Fisk Coal Plant in neighboring Pilsen—with children being the most vulnerable to exposure. LVEJO and our allies successfully shut down both plants. It was our most significant accomplishment of environmental justice.

Following the shut down, a Crawford Reuse Task Force was formed to consider strategies to reuse both sites. The task force consisted of three heads of local organizations, one member from Midwest Generation (owners and operators of Crawford), two former aldermen, one labor representative, one ComEd representative, and one economic development representative from City Hall, and was facilitated by the Delta Institute, a local nonprofit that works on solving “complex environmental challenges.” Per the final report, “Residents have participated in numerous workshops, surveys and visioning exercises regarding the sites. From these, several themes emerged, including the desire for a clean environment, sustainability of the neighborhood, affordability, local education and jobs.”

The community was hopeful that engagement would be ongoing, and that any

¬ SEPTEMBER 16, 2020

future developer would be realistic, provide transparent updates, and remain accountable.

But Hilco’s acquisition of the site has always lacked transparency. The developer purchased the property in December 2017 for $12.25 million in a backroom deal that occurred during the tenure of then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who received $135,900 in political contributions from Hilco CEO Jeffrey Hecktman, then-22nd Ward Alderman Ricardo Muñoz (who received $3,000), and then-commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development (DPD), David Reifman.

In August 2018, Hilco held two community meetings, in which residents expressed concerns or outright rejected their plan. At both meetings, Hilco claimed they were doing the community a favor by demolishing the coal plant, remediating the site, and constructing a massive warehouse that they claim will bring an estimated 178 permanent jobs once completed. Even when they heard the community’s pleas that we had too many semi-trucks driving through our residential streets, and that our air quality was among the worst in the state, they did not care to listen. The rezoning was pushed by Muñoz through the Chicago Plan Commission and the City Council the very next month.

During those community meetings, representatives of the multi-billion dollar corporation said they would not be seeking public funding. Yet, in January 2019, they

were appearing before the City Council’s Committee on Economic, Capital and Technology Development, to request the Cook County Class 6b tax break, which would reward them with $19.7 million over a twelve-year period. They bought the property for less than that. Once again, LVEJO and residents testified against the plan during public comment, while Muñoz used his aldermanic prerogative to force it through.

Throughout meetings of the Chicago Plan Commission, City Council, and City Council committees, Hilco had the support of the Little Village Chamber of Commerce and local businesses that are owned by the family of Eve Rodriguez, who both serves on the Chamber board and does public relations consulting for Hilco. In an attempt to buy more support, Hilco has hosted shoe giveaways and created two $10,000 scholarships for City Colleges of Chicago.

(Currently CPS students can attend City Colleges for free as long as they meet certain requirements.) They have also sent out promotional mailers and put ads on Mexican radio.

The coal plant operated from 1924 to 2012 and was one of the dirtiest in the country when it closed, making remediation of the land both delicate and dangerous.

Hilco promised to inform the community throughout the remediation and demolition process. They created a website, but did minimal outreach to inform nearby

ILLUSTRATION BY HALEY TWEEDELL

households of efforts to remove toxic elements from the building or from the soil.

In December 2019, Reynaldo Grimaldo, 54, a worker who was also a Little Village resident, fell fifty feet from an elevated platform at the site, and died.

When it came time to demolish the smokestack, the City of Chicago’s Department of Buildings was negligent in approving the demolition permits, while Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Department of Public Health failed to halt the demolition despite having been warned of the potential health risks it posed in the middle of a respiratory pandemic. Current 22nd Ward Alderman Mike Rodriguez inherited the project and knew about the scheduled implosion more than a week before the community was alerted. Yet officials kept the community in the dark about their plans.

On April 11, Hilco and their contractors failed to use the proper precautions: they used explosives to implode the centuryold smokestack and did not have enough water cannons to spray down the mushroom cloud of dust and debris. Multiple news outlets showed footage of the aftermath captured by the residents themselves. A day after the implosion, 78-year-old Fernando Cantú passed away after he had tended to his garden. He lived a few blocks away from Crawford, and his immune system was compromised due to issues with asthma and COPD; it is possible that the toxic particulate matter aggravated his respiratory system.

Mayor Lightfoot placed the blame on Hilco, issued a temporary stop work order, and fined them $68,000. Hilco responded by washing home and automobile windows

near the site and passing out masks in the surrounding blocks. But following a citysponsored virtual community meeting hosted by the commissioner of the Department of Buildings, Judith Frydland, Hilco was given the green light to proceed with the demolition of the rest of the coal plant, currently underway. Shortly after that meeting, Frydland retired.

The Hilco project will bring thousands of semi-trucks daily to an area that already disproportionately experiences heavy transportation traffic compared to the rest of the city. Overall, there are more than thirty companies in the Little Village Industrial Corridor (LVIC) that are either classified as TDL or that use semi-trucks on site. These trucks are powered by diesel and release particulate matter 2.5 and 10 into the air, which can have a devastating impact on the immediate and long-term health of people who inhale these particles. The resulting truck traffic is not only hazardous to other automobiles, pedestrians, and cyclists, but also to the overall environmental health of Little Village, which already has the secondworst air quality in the state of Illinois.

Bringing thousands of more semi-trucks into the area will only further exacerbate this issue.

In nearly three years, Hilco has never shown a genuine attempt at caring about the neighborhood. Why should we believe this will ever change? Hilco has not been able to guarantee a number or the quality of jobs that the site would offer locals, due to the fact that they will be leasing the warehouse to someone else to operate it as an e-commerce warehouse. Most warehouses in Chicago hire people through staffing agencies, also

known as “temp agencies,” which have been known to exploit both undocumented immigrant and Black workers. Those same warehouses don’t pay their employees living wages or provide them with medical benefits. How will these jobs provide people the opportunity to move up or build wealth?

This is not economic development that will be beneficial in the long term.

The community already had a plan for the site when Hilco purchased the property, one that did not include a warehouse. In 2018, LVEJO created renderings based on what the community said they would like to see at the site. This included a huge greenhouse for large-scale indoor farming, which could provide organic produce to local grocery stores and the roughly 160 restaurants in the neighborhood; a food vendor hub, which would serve as a food business incubator for street vendors in the community, who make up sixty percent of all vendors in the city; and a large solar farm, which could produce up to fourteen MW of energy annually, which could power 2,660 homes, and would link to the Future Energy Jobs Act (FEJA) and Solar For All state programs, which create access to job training and clean energy jobs in lowincome communities.

These are the types of projects that would transform land use in the Little Village Industrial Corridor, potentially bringing thousands of jobs and wealthbuilding opportunities to the community, while also bringing environmental justice to a neighborhood that has long suffered from environmental racism. Given the fact that the Crawford site is located within the Little Village Industrial Corridor, at 1,252.2

acres is the third-largest in the city, we have a great opportunity to invest in industries that don’t further exacerbate environmental issues or exploit workers.

The City of Chicago should not be giving tax subsidies to developers who only look to exploit our labor force, but to developments that will truly engage and benefit our communities. We don’t need a one-million-square-foot warehouse that will continue to poison our community.

Little Village, like countless communities across the planet, needs a Just Transition.

This is fundamentally about disinvesting in industries that are fossil-fuel based, and investing in industries that use renewable energies or alternative methods of production that don’t exploit natural resources. If the largest economies in the world refuse to stop using fossil fuels, we may face a climate catastrophe. But Little Village, and Chicago as a whole, can still be a model for other major cities, especially those with a large industrial sector. These are the developments that Little Village, along with every working class neighborhood in the city deserves. José Acosta-Córdova is a research organizer at the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO). He completed his Master’s degree in Urban Planning and Policy at UIC and is a first year Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studying issues related to transportation and environmental justice. This is his first piece for the Weekly.

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773.388.1600 howardbrown.org/2020census

NOW OPEN Advance Tickets Required Lead support for Monet and Chicago is generously contributed by

THE KENNETH C. GRIFFIN CHARITABLE FUND Lead Corporate Sponsors

Major funding is provided by Lesley and Janice Lederer, the Shure Charitable Trust, Richard F. and Christine F. Karger, Mark and Charlene Novak, and Margot Levin Schiff and the Harold Schiff Foundation. Additional support is contributed by the Alice M. LaPert Fund for French Impressionism, Alison R. Barker in honor of Ruth Stark Randolph, the Kemper Educational and Charitable Fund, the Rose L. and Sidney N. Shure Endowment, Gail Elden, and Michelle Lozins. Members of the Exhibitions Trust provide annual leadership support for the museumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s operations, including exhibition development, conservation and collection care, and educational programming. The Exhibitions Trust includes an anonymous donor; Neil Bluhm and the Bluhm Family Charitable Foundation; Jay Franke and David Herro; Karen Gray-Krehbiel and John Krehbiel, Jr.; Kenneth C. Griffin; Caryn and King Harris, The Harris Family Foundation; Josef and Margot Lakonishok; Robert M. and Diane v.S. Levy; Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff; Sylvia Neil and Dan Fischel; Anne and Chris Reyes; Cari and Michael J. Sacks; and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Claude Monet. Houses of Parliament, London (detail), 1906. The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection.