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Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, and Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo marks 20 years since the opening of the United States' extralegal prison in Guantánamo by examining local and international ramifications of state violence, while also uplifting acts of creative resistance. This exhibition highlights connections between policing and incarceration in Chicago and the human rights violations of the "Global War on Terror." It celebrates and features artworks by torture survivors, activists, artists, and collectives with long-term commitments to creating visions of justice and reparations. These works, including those made inside the extralegal military prison in Guantánamo and Stateville Prison in Illinois are extensions of conversations across antiwar, abolition, reparations, and freedom movements. When someone sits, sips and reflects over a cup of tea, there is an opening for conversation. Through the Tea Project (Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes), which informs the development of this exhibition, tea serves as a contradictory metaphor for imperialism and settler colonialism on the one hand, and human connection and international solidarity on the other.
Rehacer lo excepcional: té, tortura y reparaciones | de Chicago a Guantánamo conmemora los 20 años transcurridos desde la inauguración de la cárcel extralegal estadounidense en Guantánamo examinando las ramificaciones locales e internacionales de la violencia de Estado, a la vez que enaltece los actos de resistencia creativa. Esta exposición resalta los vínculos entre la vigilancia policial y los encarcelamientos en Chicago, así como las violaciones a los derechos humanos de la “Guerra Global contra el Terrorismo”. De igual manera, celebra e incluye obras de arte de sobrevivientes de tortura, de activistas, artistas y colectivos que tienen compromisos perdurables con crear visiones de justicia y reparaciones. Esas obras, incluyendo aquellas realizadas dentro de la cárcel militar extralegal de Guantánamo y la cárcel de Stateville en Illinois, expanden conversaciones que atraviesan los movimientos contra la guerra y en favor de la abolición, las reparaciones y la libertad. Cuando alguien se sienta, toma un sorbo de té y reflexiona, se crea un espacio para conversar. En el Proyecto del Té (Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes), que da forma al desarrollo de esta exposición, el té funge como una metáfora contradictoria del imperialismo y el colonialismo, por un lado, y de la conexión humana y la solidaridad internacional, por el otro.
Sabri al-Qurashi
Untitled, 2012
Courtesy of the artist
Untitled, 2014
And, they tried to write on the Styrofoam cups. And, one of the brothers, he wrote in Arabic some poems, he was a poet. And, with a piece of the conch shell, he wrote a poem about dreaming and leaving Guantánamo and so on. One of the guards searched and they found this, this was terrible, they took it…Before that, let me tell you, brothers used to draw in Styrofoam on those cups, a shape of flowers. —Mansoor Adayfi, Guantánamo survivor
The Tea Project first learned about men imprisoned at Guantánamo carving into Styrofoam cups from former prison guard Chris Arendt. In a 2008 interview he said, “One thing I miss is the cups. The detainees were only allowed to have Styrofoam cups, and they would write and draw all over them…They would cover the things with flowers…I used to love those little cups."
Inspired by stories of people imprisoned at Guantánamo making marks on cups to express themselves despite the oppressive violence of the prison and the potential for retaliation, the Tea Project cast 780 porcelain Styrofoam teacups—one for each individual that is currently or has been imprisoned in the camp. Each unique cup bears an individual's name and country of citizenship on its underside, and is engraved with national flowers or indigenous flowers from that country. The number of flowers engraved on each cup reflects the number of men imprisoned from their respective countries.
Tea Project (Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes)
Teacups with the names of men transferred from Guantánamo, 2014–present
Porcelain
Courtesy of the artists
Photo: Zoey Dalbert/DePaul Art Museum
The 51st (Free) State is a body of work generated in art classes taught at Stateville by P+NAP, a collective of artists, writers, and scholars. From 2019–22, the group engaged in research and discussions, imagining a sovereign nation of incarcerated people. The US prison population is the size of and uses the resources of a small nation state. The struggles, pains, joys, hopes, creativity, intellect, and visions of the 2.2 million people incarcerated in the US parallel that of many other nations' people. Through the pandemic, artists created iconic elements of state-craft, including emblems, songs, choreography, graphic narratives, symbols, tools, and stage sets. These images and words are a call to community, one that connects thousands of people incarcerated across the nation through a spatial-political imaginary. Far from disposable, this community is one with its own sense of sovereignty, where imagining a state of freedom is a means to achieving a corporeal state of freedom.
Prison + Neighborhood Arts / Education Project (P+NAP)
Aaron Barnes, Aaron Hughes, Allen “NY" Johnson, Antoine Ford, Antwan Tyler, Carlos Ayala, Carlvosier Smith, Damon Locks, Darrell Fair, Derrick Parks, Devon Terrell, Doris Sterling, Ike Easley, John Knight, Johnny Taylor, Luan Luna, Kevin Walker, Lamaine Jefferson, Martine Whitehead, Rayon Sampson, Robert Curry, Rodney Love, Samuel Elam, Sarah Ross
The 51st (Free) State, 2019–22Mixed mediaCourtesy of Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project
The 51st (Free) State, 2019–22Mixed mediaCourtesy of Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project
Many artists imprisoned at Guantánamo painted ships at sea as a way to imagine freedom. Survivor Sabri al-Qurashi notes, “At Guantánamo, depending on the place where I was, in different camps or blocks, I could see and smell and hear the sea. And for me, the sea was a symbol for freedom."
Access to supplies and time to create at Guantánamo is restricted. Artists are searched on their way to and from art classes, and sometimes even chained to a chair while painting. Despite this, the will to create persists. Djamel Ameziane notes, “I overcame the conditions of imprisonment during all these past years by always maintaining hope that one day I would be freed, because I am innocent…The past years were all the worst moments. I would describe them as a boat out at sea, battered by successive storms during its trip towards an unknown destination, benefiting only from very short periods of respite between two storms. These respites were the best moments."
Djamel Ameziane
Untitled, 2011
Watercolor
Courtesy of the artist, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Youssef Ameziane
Ghaleb Al-Bihani
Untitled, 2015
Pastel on paper
Courtesy of the artist and Center for Constitutional Rights
Photo: Robert Chase Heishman
Khalid Qasim
Untitled, 2016
Instant coffee and paint on paper
Courtesy of the artist and Shelby Sullivan-Bennis
In this new series Won't You Help to Sing These Songs of Freedom?, Dorothy Burge combines her improvisational hand quilting practice with decades of experience as an activist and community organizer to depict those still incarcerated who have survived torture at the hands of Chicago police commander Jon Burge. The personal and political come together in these quilts as emblems of the intergenerational struggles of survivors seeking justice and reparations.
Dorothy Burge's quilted portraits are rooted in local history and solidarity. Their content chosen from direct requests by friends and family, the quilts commemorate the community. For this new series, Burge depicts the activism and involvement of young community members who have joined the Black Lives Matter movement and taken to the streets to demand justice following the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. This transformative vernacular of witness and resistance is embedded within the everyday habits and technologies of social movement work reflected in the traditions of quilting. It is an art of solidarity.
Free Gerald Reed From the series Won't You Help to Sing These Songs of Freedom?, 2021 Quilted fabrics Courtesy of the artist Photo: Zoey Dalbert/DePaul Art Museum
Free Robert Allen Quilted fabrics From the series Won't You Help to Sing These Songs of Freedom?, 2021 Quilted fabrics Courtesy of the artist Photo: Zoey Dalbert/DePaul Art Museum
Free Clayborn Smith Quilted fabrics From the series Won't You Help to Sing These Songs of Freedom?, 2021 Quilted fabrics Courtesy of the artist Photo: Zoey Dalbert/DePaul Art Museum
Free Derrick King Quilted fabrics From the series Won't You Help to Sing These Songs of Freedom?, 2021 Quilted fabrics Courtesy of the artist Photo: Zoey Dalbert/DePaul Art Museum
I Can't Breathe 1, 2021
I Can't Breathe 2
Quilted fabric
Courtesy of the artist
Photo: Zoey Dalbert/DePaul Art Museum
Debi Cornwall's series Beyond Gitmo consists of portraits of fourteen men held at Guantánamo without charges ever being filed against them. Assumed to be dangerous "terrorists," many were in fact kidnapped, sold for ransom to US forces, and imprisoned for upwards of twelve years. Cornwall highlights the continued stigma these men face with their release into newfound and paradoxical states of freedom by photographing them from behind, a nod to the US military's regulations to never photograph the faces of imprisoned people. Though they are no longer physically at Guantánamo, their shared experience continues to impact their lives as "free" civilians in foreign lands.
Murat, Turkish German (Germany) Refugee Counselor Held: 4 years, 7 months, 22 days Released: August 24, 2006 Charges: never filed From the series Beyond Gitmo, 2015 Chromogenic print from digital photograph Courtesy of the artist
Rustam, Uzbek (Ireland) Held: 7 years, 8 months, 7 days Transferred to Ireland: September 27, 2009 Charges: never filed From the series Beyond Gitmo, 2015 Chromogenic print from digital photograph Courtesy of the artist
As of today, there are thirty-nine imprisoned people in Guantánamo, many of whom have been held for twenty years without charge or trial and remain as “forever prisoners." A majority of these men have been cleared for release by an interagency Periodic Review Board, yet still remain imprisoned. Lawyers representing the imprisoned men, survivors of the prisons, and activists have long called for the men to be released and the prison closed. #CloseGuantanamo #FreeThemAll
Teacups with the names of men currently imprisoned in Guantánamo, 2014–presentPorcelainCourtesy of the artists
Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif was just twenty-seven years old when he died of alleged suicide by overdose of psychotropic drugs after multiple petitions to secure his release. While at Guantánamo, Latif participated in a number of hunger strikes, about which he wrote: Where is the world to save us from torture? Where is the world to save us from the fire and sadness? Where is the world to save the hunger strikers? In memory of the nine men who died while imprisoned in Guantánamo, the Tea Project created and displays one teacup for each of these men:
Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif died on September 8, 2012. Alleged cause of death, suicide.
Haji Naseem (Inayatullah) died on May 18, 2011. Alleged cause of death, suicide.
Awal Gul died on February 2, 2011. Alleged cause of death, suicide.
Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al-Hanashi died on June 1, 2009. Alleged cause of death, suicide.
Abdul Razzaq Hekmati died on December 30, 2007. Alleged cause of death, cancer.
Abdul Rahman Ma'Ath Thafir al-Amri died on May 30, 2007. Alleged cause of death, suicide.
Yasser Talal al-Zahrani died on June 10, 2006. Alleged cause of death, suicide.
Mana Shaman Allabardi al-Tabi, died on June 10, 2006. Alleged cause of death, suicide.
Ali Abdullah Ahmed died on June 10, 2006. Alleged cause of death, suicide.
Khalid Qasim
Untitled (One candle for the nine men who died in Guantánamo), 2017
Gravel, Glue, MRE-box, and paint
What kind of spring is this,Where there are no flowers andThe air is filled with a miserable smell?—Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, Guantánamo survivor
This wall of forty-eight flower drawings and paintings made inside Guantánamo represents each of the forty-eight countries that have had citizens extralegally imprisoned there.
From these collected works beauty shines through despite.
Installation view
Untitled, 2010
Courtesy of the artist and Greg McConnell
Abdualmalik Abud
Paint on paper
Courtesy of the artist
Ahmed Badr Rabbani
Acrylic on card
Courtesy of the artist, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Reprieve
These collaborative works between photographer Debi Cornwall and Guantánamo survivor Djamel Ameziane play with power and scale. Ameziane writing directly on these images references graffiti, marking territory as one's own. His commentary is a rewriting of a state-sanctioned history of Guantánamo. From Ameziane's perspective, annotation becomes political commentary and humor. “I think of the pieces with Djamel as collaborations, but actually they more specifically represent his
interventions,'' explains Cornwall. “He took the box of prints home with him and opted to annotate them: with his experiences that were so contrary to the official messaging, and with his commentary on the place and the fictions it staged for public consumption. In that sense, my prints act simply as his palette."
Debi Cornwall and Djamel Ameziane
Comfort Items, Camp 5 (Stop lying to the world), 2015
Print
Courtesy of the artists
Compliant Detainee Media Room, Camp 5 (Let them eat cookies!), 2015
Detainee Art, Detainee Library (Are we the worst of the worst?), 2015
Lady Liberty, Camp Echo (Send me home), 2015
Camp 6 Show Cell (The hellfire of Guantánamo, grave for the living), 2015
Shower Mirror, Camp 5 (First they took the doors, then the curtains), 2015
Mashaun Ali Hendricks's practice is rooted in restorative justice. unresolved animates “House Resolution 194," a bill passed in 2008 that apologizes for the enslavement and racial segregation of African Americans. In this work, Hendricks points out the difficulties and resistance toward this legislation. Hendricks adds his own thoughts in writing (or “double-clicks" as he calls it) to the original content and invites us to engage with the text: “read, circle, and/or underline words or phrases that stand out to you and write your response." Like the Speculative Reparations Ordinance on the first floor, which moved from dream to reality, Hendricks's work prompts reckoning and dreaming.
Mashaun Ali Hendricks
unresolved, 2017–present
Sound and mixed media
Damon Locks has been teaching art at Stateville Prison—a maximum security state prison in Crest Hill, Illinois—since 2014. Inspired by a class taught as part of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project (P+NAP) called “51st (Free) State Comics," Locks's Keep Your Mind Free is a series of nine works that use the graphic novel and comic book pages as the entry point into topics such as resilience, justice/injustice, surveillance, identity, belonging, brilliance, imagination, freedom, and transcendence.
Locks himself completed the same assignment he proposed to his students: “To address this world as we find it right at this moment or [the] need to imagine a radically new one, these assignments can be interpreted to suit your needs."
Damon Locks
Keep Your Mind Free, 2021
Pen and ink on paper
Photo: Zoey Dalbert/ DePaul Art Museum
Photo: Zoey Dalbert/ DePaul Art Museum
House of Knowledge is a rare sculpture to leave Guantánamo. There is inventiveness required to work at this scale, given the
restrictions within the prison, and patience to gather materials over long periods of time. Formal from the front and playing with representation, the work presents a book, a clock, and a stage for Qasim's ideas of timeless knowledge in contrast to the archaic and irrational prison system. On the more private back and sides of the work, Qasim included sketches and doodles, marking his own work like graffiti.
House of Knowledge, 2017
Wood, coffee, creamer, paint, and cardboard
The Wall of Names memorializes over 170 known torture survivors. Jon Burge, a Chicago police detective and commander, directly and indirectly participated in the torture of at least 118 people between 1972 and 1991. Each name is carefully drawn on the wall and includes the living and the dead, those who are “free," and those who are still incarcerated. Some lines are left blank for survivors to write their own names at a live ceremony during the exhibition, in what becomes a public ritual and a testimony that they are still here. The words “unknown victim" and additional blank lines honor those whose names we do not know, but who must still be remembered. Chicago Torture Justice Memorials notes, “This is not, and never can be, a complete list."
Chicago Torture Justice Memorials*
Wall of Names, 2012/22
Pencil
Courtesy of Chicago Torture Justice Memorials
*Chicago Torture Justice Memorials includes A. Laurie Palmer, Alice Kim, Carla Mayer, Daris Jasper, Dorothy Burge, Iván Arenas, John Lee, Patricia Nguyen, Joey Mogul, Mary Patten, Sarah Ross, and Vincent Wade Robinson, among others.
This installation visualizes the geographies of Chicago Police and the US military's interconnected histories of torture and policing. The juxtaposed modern education tools of the iPad and mapping technology against the desk—a remnant of the mass closure of predominantly Black public schools on the South and West sides of Chicago in 2013—suggests the possibilities for what Chicago's students could be learning in their classrooms: an expanded understanding of their own neighborhoods' spatial and historical connection to policing across the world and a shared struggle under the Global War on Terror.
To view more, newly researched connections between Chicago Police and the US military, visit bit.ly/burgenetwork.
Maira Khwaja, Maheen Khan, Marie Mendoza, Invisible Institute
Coordinates of Torture, 2022
School desk from closed Chicago Public School, iPad, projector, and MapBox software
Courtesy of the artist, Invisible Institute, and John Preus
Trevor Paglen's photographs depict “places that do not exist": CIA black sites, secret government buildings, extralegal prisons. Salt Pit shows the infamous secret CIA detention facility of the same name, which imprisoned people at Guantánamo referred to as the “dark prison." Thought to be the only photograph of the facility, Paglen used testimony of torture survivor Khalid el-Masri, flight records, and Google Earth to locate the facility. Unmarked 737 shows a Boeing 737 plane shrouded in darkness, a figure barely visible below the plane's airstairs. Such planes, which operate under the cover of darkness and are registered under the names of fictional people, are used to shuttle government workers and suspected “terrorists" to a clandestine network of prisons for interrogation and torture. The darkness in these images mirrors the void of transparency in the US's practices of extraordinary rendition and torture, while the tools of these operations are as innocuous as a passenger plane hidden in plain sight.
Trevor Paglen
Salt Pit, Shomali Plains Northeast of Kabul, Afghanistan, 2006, 2006C-print
Courtesy of the artist and Atlman Siegel, San Francisco
Trevor Paglen
Unmarked 737 at “Gold Coast" Terminal, Las Vegas, NV; Distance ~ 1 mile, 10:44pm, 2007, 2007C-print
The history of State violence and resistance built through collective action can offer a portal for analysis, learning, and action toward social transformation. This timeline focuses on events interlaced between Chicago and the globe, violence perpetrated by both police and the military, and movements for justice that never rest.
Sources: Lucky Pierre WOT timelines by year, Chicago Torture Justice Memorials timeline, CTJM history of campaign, Chicago Police Torture archive, and CNN Guantánamo.
Lucky Pierre and Joey Mogul
Overlay: Directly participated in or implicitly approved of, 2021
Mixed mediaCourtesy of the artists
Khalid Qasim has been held prisoner in Guantánamo for twenty years. The landscape painting is a recollection of his home in Yemen. Contrasting this reflection of home is the high contrast painting documenting torture, temperature extremes, fire, and the frigid winds of an air conditioner. The depth of space in this work, with its dark recesses, has a stillness that has a gravity greater than the scale of the work.
Paper and paint
Untitled, 2017Pillowcase, gesso, and acrylic paint
In early 2012, Chicago Torture Justice Memorials (CTJM) issued a call for memorials to honor the decades-long struggle waged by Chicago police torture survivors, their families, attorneys, community activists, and journalists. This call exposed the history of police torture in Chicago and demanded justice and accountability for racist acts of terror. In response, attorney and organizer Joey Mogul created a speculative reparations ordinance, outlining the harms committed and creating a set of demands after listening to and learning from survivors, families, and communities. Building on Attorney Standish Willis's call for reparations for Chicago police torture survivors, Mogul utilized legal language in order to establish a conceptual link between memorial-making and the citywide reparations campaign.
The speculative reparations ordinance came to fruition when Chicago's City Council approved the reparations ordinance on May 6, 2015 in response to a multiracial, intergenerational grassroots campaign waged by CTJM, Project NIA, We Charge Genocide, and Amnesty International, USA. Building on this history and connecting the local to the international, the Tea Project presents a Speculative Reparations Ordinance for Guantánamo Torture Survivors as an advocacy tool in anticipation of the US accepting accountability and recognizing harms.
Chicago Torture Justice Memorials and Joey Mogul
Speculative Reparations Ordinance for Chicago (Burge) Police Torture Survivors, 2012Ink on cottonCourtesy of Chicago Torture Justice Memorials
Fifth memorial star concept by Carla Jean Mayer
Tea Project (Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes)
Speculative Reparations Ordinance for Guantánamo Torture Survivors, 2022
Ink on silk
Chicago streets have long been a catalyst for abolitionist organizing. These twenty-four photographs teleport the viewer to the center of protests in the city. The spring 2020 police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked unprecedented uprisings across the country in response to the many Black lives murdered by police. Protesters nationwide adopted demands to “Defund the Police" and hashtags such as #AbolitionNOW and #FreeThemAll spread across many social media platforms. These demands grew out of daring work by activists and organizers to sow abolitionist dreams and abolitionist imaginations in the years prior.
Sarah-Ji Rhee
Abolitionist Dreams, Abolitionist Imaginations, 2015–21
Digital photos
Courtesy of the artist
Sarah-Ji Rhee
Installation view
Photo: Zoey Dalbert/DePaul Art Museum
Ghaleb Al-Bihani, Ahmed Badr Rabbani, and many other artists imprisoned at Guantánamo made drawings and paintings of empty tea services. Lawyers representing these artists note that these settings are empty so the artists can imagine them populated with friends and family.
The history of tea is inseparable from its roots in colonialism, the rise of global capitalism, and international military power, making it a complex metaphor for the political forces that underpin sites like Guantánamo on the one hand and family gatherings, contemplative reflection, and gestures of solidarity on the other. Tea is not merely a drink, but an essential ritual, one that transcends cultural divides and systems of oppression.
Coffee on paper
Courtesy of the artist, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Reprieve
Photo: Zoey Dalbert/DePaul Art Museum
In addition to creating the vast tea cup archive on display, the Tea Project has spent over a decade researching and compiling stories that highlight the interwoven relations between state violence and creative resistance. In this new series of works, the often latent connections between tea, torture, and survival are shown to coexist in a complex global network.
Tea Project (Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes) La Amistad, Like the Waters from 19.9031° N, 75.0967° W to 41°52'04.5"N 87°42'39.4”W on January 11, 2002, 2021. Collaged screen print on BFK Rives paper. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Zoey Dalbert/DePaul Art Museum
Informed by an unverified tale of Jon Burge disposing of his torture device—a modified field radio used to shock prisoners—in the depths of Lake Michigan, this installation imagines that radio pulled from the bottom of the lake to amplify a different story.
This work is part dock, pointing to the inherited colonial habits of the British East India Company, which is the precursor to modern corporations. This expanded the tea trade in ways that led to the growth of plantation practices and the amassing of armies to protect interests in foreign lands. Part “torture tree," underscoring anthropologist Laurence Ralph's metaphor for the racist violence rooted in the US; part guidepost, highlighting constellations of torture and resistance; and part invitation to tea, which serves not only as a contradictory metaphor for imperialism, but also as a ritual of human connection and international solidarity.
ODE TO THE SEA, 2022
Mixed media
The imagery of dead trees is a consistent visual theme in the artworks made in Guantánamo. Professor of anthropology Laurence Ralph writes in The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence that “the torture tree is rooted in an enduring idea of threat that is foundational to life in the United States. Its trunk is the use-of-force continuum. Its branches are the police officers who personify this continuum. And, its leaves are everyday incidents of police violence." The artists' works seem to embody the concept of the torture tree; however, their delicacy, power, and sometimes unexpectedly bright colors connote resistance and strength, an endurance, a tenacity to stay upright and rooted.
Muhammad Ansi
Courtesy of the artist, Beth D. Jacob, and Erin Thompson
Pen on paper
Courtesy of the artist, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Youssef Ameziane
Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, & Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo publication brings together activists, artists, poets, and torture survivors to investigate and resist the ecosystems of violence that connect Chicago to the US military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Edited by artists and co-curators Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes with Aliya Hussain (Center for Constitutional Rights) and Audrey Petty (Illinois Humanities), Remaking the Exceptional features new pieces of investigative journalism on the connections between military and police torture by Kari Lydersen (Medill School of Journalism) and Maira Khwaja (Invisable Institute), Spencer Ackerman's 2015 Guardian exposé “Bad Lieutenant," reflections on struggles for justice and reparations by Aliya Hussain, Alice Kim, and Aislinn Pulley, essays on art and resistance by Mansoor Adayfi, Marc Falkoff, and Tempestt Hazel, as well as interviews with Chicago and Guantánamo torture survivors. The richly illustrated catalog is interspersed with poetry and artwork pairings by former and current imprisoned artists creating a virtual dialogue across carceral systems. The aim of the publication is to uncover moments of beauty, poetry, and shared humanity within and despite the traumas of state violence.
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Through the voices of torture survivors and activists, the Remaking the Exceptional podcast highlights connections between policing and incarceration in Chicago and the human rights violations of the Global War on Terror, while also celebrating the struggle for justice and reparations.
Sitting, sipping, and reflecting over a cup of tea with others can create the space for conversations on difficult and at times painful subjects. It also can create opportunities to envision a new set of social relations.
For this exhibition, the Tea Project is honored to collaborate with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Chicago Torture Justice Center, Prison + Neigborhood Arts/Education Project, CAGE, People's Law Office, Witness Against Torture, HeaRT, REPRIEVE, Invisible Institute, and Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
Remaking the Exceptional is organized by DePaul Art Museum staff and is curated by contributing artists Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes.
Generous support for this exhibition has been provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, an Illinois Humanities Envisioning Justice grant, and the American Friends Service Committee-Chicago.
