Makes Me Wanna Holla: Art, Death & Imprisonment
featuring "Artist for the People" Practitioner Fellows Dorothy Burge & Michelle Daniel Jones with Mourning Our Losses
July 7 - September 10, 2023
graphic by Joaquin F. Verges
Logan Center Exhibitions, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC), and the Pozen Center Human Rights Lab (HRL) at the University of Chicago are pleased to present Makes Me Wanna Holla: Art, Death & Imprisonment featuring 2022-23 "Artist for the People" Practitioner Fellows Dorothy Burge and Michelle Daniel Jones with Mourning Our Losses.
Ms. Burge and Daniel Jones completed year-long fellowships co-hosted by CSRPC and HRL that explored the injustices of the carceral system. Their work engages critical race and human rights issues by looking back at forgotten, ignored, or suppressed stories and people. This exhibition asks: “Who gets remembered?”
Ms. Burge presents a series of quilted portraits depicting incarcerated survivors of Chicago police torture. This work is titled Won't You Help to Sing These Songs of Freedom? Each quilt is coupled with newly collected oral histories, artwork, family photos, and poems compiled by students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Also included are quilts that pay homage to two African American trans women who were murdered in Chicago in 2022; a life-size portrait of Alfred Woodfox, one of the Angola 3 who survived four decades of solitary confinement; and other with portrait quilts that demonstrate acts of resistance and resilience.
As both curator and artist, Daniel Jones presents the Mourning Our Losses (MOL) Traveling Memorial, We Shall Remember. This exhibit immerses attendees in a multi-sensory experience of COVID-19 in prisons using sound, statistics and the artistry of those currently and formerly incarcerated that speaks to the horrors of the pandemic. MOL highlights the moral cost of mass incarceration while honoring the lives of all who died while living or working behind bars.
photos by Robert Chase Heishman
About the Artists
Dorothy Burge. Photo by Daris Jasper.
Michelle Daniel Jones. Photo by Raechel Bosch.
DOROTHY BURGE
"Artist for the People” Practitioner Fellow Dorothy Burge is a fabric and multimedia artist and community activist who is inspired by history and current social justice issues. She is a self-taught quilter who began creating fiber art in the 1990s after the birth of her daughter, Maya. Dorothy is a native and current resident of Chicago, and is a descendant from a long line of quilters who hailed from Mississippi. Her realization that the history and culture of her people were being transmitted across generations in this art form inspired her to use this medium as a tool to teach history, raise cultural awareness, and inspire action. Dorothy received her Master of Arts in Urban Planning and Policy and her Bachelor of Arts in Art Design from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a member of Blacks Against Police Torture and Chicago Torture Justice Memorials; both are cultural collectives seeking justice for police torture survivors. Dorothy is also a member of the Women of Color Quilters Network. Her work will be featured in the Smithsonian’s permanent collection, and she was named a 2020 Field and MacArthur Foundation Leaders for a New Chicago recipient. Dorothy received a 2017 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist as Activist fellowship and is an Illinois Humanities Envisioning Justice Commissioned Artist.
MICHELLE DANIEL JONES
"Artist for the People" Practitioner Fellow Michelle Daniel Jones, ABD is a sixth-year doctoral student in American Studies at New York University. Michelle’s dissertation focuses on creative liberation strategies of incarcerated people in Alabama. Michelle’s fellowships include Beyond the Bars, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, Ford Foundation Bearing Witness with Art for Justice, SOZE Right of Return, Code for America and Rendering Justice with Mural Arts Philadelphia. As an artist, Michelle finds ways to funnel her research into literature, theater, visual art, and photography. Michelle is co-editor with Elizabeth Nelson of a new history of Indiana’s carceral institutions for women with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated colleagues titled, Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848 – 1920, published in 2023. Michelle co-authored play with Anastazia Schmid “The Duchess of Stringtown,” which was produced in Indianapolis and New York, and her artist installation about weaponized stigma, Point of Triangulation: Intersections of Identity, toured nationally, with a permanent public mural dedicated in October 2021.
https://www.michelledanieljones.com/
MOURNING OUR LOSSES
Mourning Our Losses (MOL) was created in April 2020 by a volunteer group of educators, artists, students, and organizers—many formerly incarcerated—committed to the release of people from prisons, jails, and immigration facilities across the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic. Viewing incarcerated people as multifaceted human beings is at the core of their work. While they refuse to dehumanize incarcerated individuals the way the prison system does every day, they are deliberate in exposing the conditions they endured behind bars, which often led to their deaths. Their memorials embrace advocacy and movement-building through telling stories that mourn and celebrate their lives.
We Shall Remember: Mourning Our Losses Traveling Memorial (MOLTM) brings to life the experience of our digital website memorial that honors the lives of people who died in correctional and detention facilities in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. The MOLTM is an immersive exhibit that is educational, displaying critical information and statistics on the pandemic in America’s prisons. We will also engage the community to add to the exhibit’s public altar for reflection and remembrance. The MOLTM showcases the artistry of those incarcerated and formerly incarcerated across the United States with a focus on Illinois artists through works that speak to the horrors of the pandemic and their strategies for survival. We remember the lives of people who died from abominable public health conditions. We believe a loss of any human life warrants mourning and our traveling memorial — through art, education, and lived experience — shares that message across the United States.
EXHIBITION PROGRAMMING
Opening Reception
Friday, July 7 | 6-8:00PM
Holla Back: Art and Conversations
Saturday, July 8 | 10AM-3:30PM
Logan Center Screening Room & Great Hall
Growing out of the exhibition, the artists will take you further into the world of art, death and imprisonment with conversations and workshops.
What These Walls Won’t Hold | 10-11:15AM | Screening Room
Documentary screening and talkback with filmmaker Adamu Chan.Set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic at San Quentin State Prison, WHAT THESE WALLS WON’T HOLD, chronicles the organizing and relationships of people who came together beyond the separations created by incarceration, to respond to this crisis. Filmmaker Adamu Chan, who was incarcerated at San Quentin during the height of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, documents his path through incarceration and beyond.
We Shall Remember: COVID-19 in Prisons | 11:15AM-12:30PM | Screening Room + Great Hall
Panel with members of Mourning Our Losses on the impact of COVID-19 in prisons, and a participatory memory project that will be added to the gallery exhibition.
Lunch + Tabling by Community Organizations | 12:30-1:30PM | Gidwitz Lobby
Survivors of Police Torture Speak | 1:30-3:30PM | Screening Room
Context + Framing with Alice Kim and Dorothy Burge.
Panel with Carl Williams, Anthony Holmes and LaTanya Sublett, moderated by Damon Williams.
Virtual Tour with Incarcerated Scholars
Thursday, July 27 | Private Event
Black August: Solidarity Quilting Workshop
Saturday, August 19 | 12-3:00PM
Logan Center Rooms 801 + 802
Send messages to incarcerated police torture survivors by making quilt patches with Dorothy Burge. Featuring guest speakers Mary L. Johnson (mother of incarcerated torture survivor Michael Johnson) and Gregory Banks (torture survivor).
Artists Live with Dorothy Burge and Michelle Daniel Jones
Wednesday, September 6 | 6-7:30PM
Logan Center Performance Penthouse
SUPPLEMENT MATERIALS
Solitary Deaths COVID-19 Impact Interviews
COVID is here! We all saw it with fear. Each day our movements are constricted, news flash of death around the world. As the days pass into weeks, the nights are filled with the screams, Man Down! In the morning we found out who left last night. We heard that folks with COVID were being locked up in solitary and dying alone. As the news flash of deaths, we pray for our families. There was no communication with our families or loved ones. With no care and inhumane treatment, we are left to die alone.
DeCedrick remembers his son DeAvon
Demitrice remembers Baldy Scott, Big Spank and G Jones
Raúl remembers Joseph Wilson aka Big Fella
Makes Me Wanna Holla: Art, Death & Imprisonment is presented by Logan Center Exhibitions, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, and the Pozen Center Human Rights Lab at the University of Chicago. Practitioner Fellows are supported in part by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Centering Race Consortium, a partnership between race studies centers at Brown University, Stanford University, UChicago, and Yale University to center the study of race in the arts and humanities. MOL’s Traveling Memorial is also supported by Illinois Humanities.