Makes Me Wanna Holla: Art, Death & Imprisonment

Makes Me Wanna Holla: Art, Death & Imprisonment
featuring “Artist for the People” Practitioner Fellows
Dorothy Burge & Michelle Daniel Jones with Mourning Our Losses
July 7 – Sept 10, 2023

Logan Center Exhibitions, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC), and the Pozen Center Human Rights Lab (HRL) at the University of Chicago are pleased to present Makes Me Wanna Holla: Art, Death & Imprisonment featuring 2022-23 “Artist for the People” Practitioner Fellows Dorothy Burge and Michelle Daniel Jones with Mourning Our Losses.
Burge and Daniel Jones completed year-long fellowship residencies co-hosted by CSRPC and HRL that explored the injustices of the carceral system. Their work engages critical race and human rights issues by looking back at forgotten, ignored, or suppressed stories and people. This exhibition asks: “Who gets remembered?”
For this exhibition, Burge presents a series of portrait quilts depicting survivors of Chicago police torture, African American trans women murdered in 2022, and Albert Woodfox of the Angola 3 who survived four decades of solitary confinement. Accompanying the Burge Survivor quilts are newly presented bibliographic compilations, including artworks, family photos and poems compiled by students at the School of the Art Institute.
As both curator and artist, Daniel Jones presents the Mourning Our Losses (MOL) Traveling Memorial, We Shall Remember. This exhibit immerses attendees in a multi-sensory experience of COVID-19 in prisons using sound, statistics and the artistry of those currently and formerly incarcerated that speaks to the horrors of the pandemic. MOL highlights the moral cost of mass incarceration while honoring the lives of all who died while living or working behind bars.

Makes Me Wanna Holla: Art, Death & Imprisonment is presented by Logan Center Exhibitions, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, and the Pozen Center Human Rights Lab at the University of Chicago. Practitioner Fellows are supported in part by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Centering Race Consortium, a partnership between race studies centers at Brown University, Stanford University, UChicago, and Yale University to center the study of race in the arts and humanities. MOL’s Traveling Memorial is also supported by the Prison Neighborhood + Arts/Education Program and Illinois Humanities.