Jordan Sarti

“Reclaiming the Crown: The Footwork King’s Battle with Money Bail”, a documentary released in December by Chicago Community Bond Fund (CCBF) and Sensitive Visuals, tells the story of Wolf’s battle with money bail. The ten-minute film packs in interviews, scenes of Wolf in his neighborhood or talking to loved ones, and clips of rallies in the citywide movement to end money bond.

Today, Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project teaches 13 classes at Stateville each year, along with workshops and guest lectures. Each semester is given a loosely-defined theme, and classes work to develop multimedia projects to exhibit in galleries and institutions on the outside.

Continuing the Envisioning Justice project’s coverage of Just Art, I sat down with Aimee Krall-Lanoue, a teaching artist who has facilitated weekly writing classes at Cook County Jail since May.

Just Art is a long-term engagement with the Cook County Jail, wherein everyone involved—detainees, teaching artists, and jail staff—attempt to create a space that runs counter to the logic of incarceration, from within that system.

bria royal is a 24-year-old multidisciplinary artist from the West side of Chicago. bria’s work often deals with Black and Indigenous mythologies, ecofeminism and futurist possibilities. In 2017, she released a graphic novel titled Black Girl Mania which fuses science fiction and personal narrative to follow a protagonist navigating mental illness in a post-climate change world’s last habitable land mass.

On the night of the screening of Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall, the newest intervention in Maria Gaspar’s 96 Acres Project, the area around Cook County Jail was vibrantly alive.

Children’s laughter bounced off the walls of the Co-Prosperity Sphere gallery as a group of about 40 people gathered for a “Day of Solidarity” on August 4 in support of an upcoming national prison strike.

More stats to celebrate the most frequently banned and challenged books

Stats about the movement for free access to scholarly research

Stats for National Summer Learning Day

Ron Charles, reviewer and editor at The Washington Post’s “Book World,” is taking the art of book reviewing from the ivory tower to the viral contours of internet streaming. Earlier this year, Charles won the Louis Shores Award for excellence in reviewing from the Reference and User Services Association, a division of the American Library Association. He chatted with American Libraries about summer reading, feminist dystopias, and his run-ins with the Secret Service.

While the march’s groundswell of many first-time activists comes with a learning curve, some on the Left are hopeful.
At the 2018 Chicago Women’s March, Mujeres Latinas en Accion community leader Frances Velez marched with members of the longstanding Latina empowerment organization, sporting glittery eyeliner and holding a sign that read, “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds!”
Velez's path to empowerment wasn't easy. Ten years ago, she turned to Mujeres as a survivor of dome...

The optics were often almost utopian: a racially, geographically diverse coalition of women ready to fight for a better world. But the structure of the convention itself—with a $295 price tag for a three-day pass and a business-casual dress code—kept many women out of the conversation.

Continuing our feature on Art and Feminism, Jordan Sarti considers Kate Durbin's online performances, the work of being watched and economies of the body....

Feeling perverse in the back row of a theater packed with couples, I cringed along with Fifty Shades of Grey. Liberal media largely condemned the film as not only terrible, but also damaging to wom…...