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Chicago Torture Justice Memorial by Jim Duignan

The exhibition: Opening the Black Box: The Charge is Torture presented the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Project  (CTJM) presented over 70 proposals for memorializing documented cases of torture by Chicago police. CTJM held workshops, discussions, and round tables in conversation with the torture survivors and their families to share knowledge about this history, and to consider the forms memorialization might take.
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Michael Piazza’s suitcase archive

This is Michael’s suitcase. He filled it with soil from the side of his house on Albany to take to Germany. I am not sure why I have it. It may have contained other pieces or materials or maybe left at my house for some reason from moving something. We did so many projects together and some alongside each other. It was a suitcase.

When I heard Michael died I brought the suitcase into my garage. I was overwhelmed with melancholy and could not do anything but gather what I had and set it all in a suitcase. It was empty and all I could do was to fill the suitcase with every item I had of Michaels. There are shared pieces, and remnants of collaborations intersected and overlapping. Postcards, and writings, small objects, and books he wrote and books we talked about. He was a reader. His pal, poet Bertha Husband told me that. Michael introduced me to her.

The suitcase archive has been near me since April 30, 2006, filled minutes after. I would like to give the suitcase archive to his sons, Sam and Franklin. I will do that when I see them.

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Louis Sullivan Memorial

Architect Louis Sullivan was a life long Chicagoan, whose work and stories of struggle has many connections for me and had seeped into my consciousness as a boy.  Planted with ornamental cabbages and the letters of an early department store Schleshinger & Meyer Department Store is a memorial to his life. The piece is in the collection of the Sullivan Gallery in Chicago.