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TORTURE

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MY UNCLE IS

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ocial Practice History Series Series tors Mary Jane Jacob and Kate Zeller

ART AND ILLEGALITY

103 Reflections on the Case by the US Justice Department against

Steven Kurtz and Robert Ferrell

Claire Pentecost CONTENTS

vii Preface 1 Introduction 111 Art in Public Space: Democracy in Action Mary Jane Jacob

Rebecca Zorach

Nicole Marroquin

AGAINST THE INEVITABILITY OF THE PRESENT

17 "And What Happens to You Concerns Us Here": Imaginings for a (New) Prison Arts Movement

Erica R. Meiners and Sarah Ross

31 William Walker's Walls of Prophecy and Protest, and the Revolutionary Roots of a Public Art Movement Je if Huebner

47 Haymarket: An Embattled History of Static Monuments and Public Interventions Nicolas Lampert

59 Marks, Messages, Manifests: Public Political Intervention in Chicago Rebecca Zorach

LAW AS ARTISTIC MEDIUM

79 Why Artists?

Laurie Jo Reynolds and Stephen F. Eisenman

81 Cold Storage on the Periphery Laurie Jo Reynolds

87 Against the Machine: Artists for Harold Washington Joyce Owens

91 Mapping the Depths of a Lake Sarah Kanouse

95 The TIF Illumination Project and Civic Imagination Tom Tresser

119 Our Kids Didn't Invent Guns

Lavie Raven interviewed by Rebecca Zorach

SOLIDARITIES

133 Report to the Public Lisa Junkin Lopez and Benneth Lee

141 Officer Friendly Never Lived Here: Youth, Urban Policing,

and Art Mariame Kaba

145 Simply Agreeing to Appear Together: A Conversation about

Street-Level Video lnigo Manglano-Ovalle interviewed by Rebecca Zorach

153 Prison and Print Projects by Temporary Services and Michael Piazza

167 Building a Gang-Proof Suit: A Pedagogical and Artistic

Framework for the Stockyard Institute Jim Duignan

CHALLENGING THE SECURITY STATE

177 Justice, Radically Imagined Members of Chicago Torture Justice Memorials interviewed by Rebecca Zorach

187 Border Zones of Art and Activism Rozalinda Borcila interviewed by Rebecca Zorach

195 The 2009 Winter Unlympic Games Anne Elizabeth Moore

205 What Is to Be (Un)Done: Notes on Teaching Art and Terrorism

Mary Patten

219 Contributors 227 Index

The TIF Illumination Project and Civic Imagination Tom Tresser

Chicago has a notoriously corrupt government; thirty aldermen have been sent to prison in as many years. This is a tough town for civic engage-ment, government transparency, and grassroots urban policy planning. The Tax Increment Financing (TIF) Illumination Project is an effort of a group of volunteers in Chicago to investigate and expose a decades-old municipal finance scheme that annually extracts almost $500 million of local property taxes and places that money in a program controlled by the Mayor.

TIF districts were first implemented in the 1950s in California as a way to finance urban renewal. They now exist in forty-nine states and the District of Columbia, but the City of Chicago has embraced them with par-ticular enthusiasm. A TIF district is created by the City's Department of Planning and Development as a tool to capture property taxes within its boundaries. For up to twenty-three years (a period defined by Illinois law), the TIF district can capture the "tax increment"—that is, the amount by which property taxes have increased from the year the TIF was created—for all those properties. This amount is made unavailable to the public finance process that funds schools, libraries, parks, and other public insti-tutions; instead, it is doled out in undemocratic ways to developers and institutions. Chicago has 151 TIF districts covering about 32 percent of the city. (No other city in America has so many sts ia I taxing bodies,) Since TIFs first appeared in Chicago in 198(5, l a rod more than $5 billionin property taxes, most orwhieli has gone lo major companies (such

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The TIF Illumination Project is organized by CivicLab, a co-working space in the West Loop dedicated to collaboration, education, and innova-tion around civic engagement, This is an exercise in civic imagination, civic geography, and civic mapping. We set out to answer the question: "What are TIFs doing to my community?" For example, if you ask a person "How is life in the Kinzie Industrial TIF?" they will look at you blankly. But if you ask "How is life in the 27th Ward?" people can locate themselves and form a response based on their lived experience of that community, We are tell-ing people what TIFs are doing to us ward by ward. Using data mining, GIS coding, map-making, investigatory journalism, and crowd-sourced organiz-ing, our volunteers are compiling an unprecedented picture of TIFs' effects across the city.

In wards around the city, we hold TIF town meetings that we call "Illuminations." We walk participants through the history and scope of the TIF program and zoom in to reveal the details of the TIFs in the ward we are visiting. We reveal how many TIFs are in that ward, how much money was collected in the last year, how much money was left in the TIF accounts at the start of that year, which projects have been funded by TIFs within the ward, and what schools in the ward have been closed or had their budgets cut. Perhaps the most relevant feature of this entire process, from the per-spective of the civic arts, is that in these meetings we combine our research and data mining with design and storytelling in order to reveal what is actu-ally happening to our communities. We produce a graphic poster presenting our data against the map of the ward. From February 2013 to June 2014, the Project illuminated 124 TIFs across twenty-seven wards in front of more than 2,200 people.

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TIF Illumination Project, map of the 4th ward Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district, 2011. See www.tifreports.com . Courtesy of Tom Tresser. Design: Carlyn So.

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