RECOMMENDED In a time of economic collapse and an unpopular war, it is worth looking back forty years to 1968 when Americans were told they could have “guns and butter,” and many of them said, “Hold the guns.” This lavish exhibit of the art that responded to the fabled Chicago Democratic Party convention and played a part in the protests against Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War policy is suffused with the utopian optimism of the period—peaceful people in motion waving splashy placards and confident of their righteousness and in their people power—that was soon to be dispelled by the “police riot.” Among the ten documentary photographers on display here, most of whom show us crowds of the mainly white middle-class faithful, Robert Sengstacke introduces a counterpoint with his subdued color images of the “Wall of Respect Mural”—a tribute to black liberation at 43rd and Langley—that adds a needed fillip of the world from which Barack Obama came that was filled with genuine hope rather than a will to believe. (Michael Weinstein)
The Craft of Reparations: DePaul Art Museum Connects Local and International State Violence “Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, and Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo” at the DePaul Art Museum examines the question of reparations by tackling two cases: the well-documented tragedy of Chicago police torture and the ongoing international scandal of Guantánamo Bay.
