Photo provided by DePaul Art Museum
Art Publication Hyperallergic recently released their Top 50 Art Exhibits of 2022. Named in this list is Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, & Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo. Read the blurb from Lori Waxman below and view the full list of exhibitions named here.
“This was unfortunately the show we needed in 2022, to mark the 20th anniversary of the opening of the US government’s extralegal military prison at its naval base in Cuba. Connecting the human rights abuses of Gitmo with those committed closer to home at the hands of the Chicago Police Department (CPD), Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, & Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo managed to be enraging, heartbreaking — and replete with the humanity of creative resistance. The show filled the entirety of the DePaul Art Museum and included the work of some two dozen individuals and collectives, among them inmates at an Illinois supermax facility and Gitmo detainees past and present: Dorothy Burge, quilter of textile portraits of CPD victims; the Invisible Institute, whose interactive map concretely linked torture techniques employed by the police to those used in overseas wars; and Tea Project, an endeavor of Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes, who also co-curated the exhibition. The art here was documentary, conceptual, legalistic, therapeutic, representational, memorializing, and visionary. It was whatever it needed to be and much of it — like the struggle for justice — is ongoing. “ —Lori Waxman
The curators hired the Invisible Institute to provide background research to contribute a chapter to the exhibition’s book: Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, and Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo, and inform the exhibition’s design. As contributing artists & researchers, Maira Khwaja, Maheen Khan, and Marie Mendoza exhibited a featured interactive map that shows connections between Chicago Police and US Military.
Photo provided by DePaul Art Museum