David Weinberg Photography | 300 West Superior Street | Suite 203 | Chicago, IL | 60654 1

For Immediate Release – January 5th, 2014

Media Contact: Kasia Houlihan, Studio Manager Kasia@d-weinberg.com | (312) 529 – 5090 David Weinberg Photography | Mon – Sat, 10am – 5pm 300 West Superior Street, Suite 203, Chicago, IL 60654 High resolution images available upon request.

Try Youth as Youth February 13th – May 9th, 2015 Tirtza Even | Steve Davis Steve Liss | Richard Ross

Impact Night February 12, 2015: 6-9pm (Tickets Available Here) Members of the press are invited to attend for free. To RSVP please email Studio Manager, Kasia Houlihan: Kasia@d-weinberg.com Opening Reception February 13, 2015: 5-8pm The ACLU of Illinois and David Weinberg Photography invite you to examine the juvenile justice system in America through an exhibit of photography, sculpture and video installation aiming to shed light on the lives of incarcerated youth. Try Youth As Youth features works by four artists with a shared dedication for institutional reform of the systems that far too often dehumanize young people and fail to provide them with constitutionally adequate conditions and services.

Photos by Richard Ross

David Weinberg Photography | 300 West Superior Street | Suite 203 | Chicago, IL | 60654 2

Video Still from Natural Life by Tirtza Even Tirtza Even presents her video Natural Life, a two-channel projection installation that challenges inequities in the juvenile justice system by depicting the stories of five individuals who were sentenced to life without parole (“natural life”) for crimes they committed as youth. The video and accompanying sculptures make tangible the complexity of each individual’s story, the severity of the conviction and the anguish that ripples out onto the families of the prisoners, the victims and community at large. The elegiac, fractured structure of Even’s project twists together the oppressive conditions with the inevitability of change, both from within the convicted youth themselves and the world that exists beyond their internment.

Steve Davis began working on his project Captured Youth in 1997 after participating as a visiting artist at one of Washington State's correctional facilities - commonly referred to as "schools”. These state-run facilities are the remnants of what were reform schools located on the outskirts of town, but what goes on within the security walls is far from educational or rehabilitative. This is where the subjects of Davis' portraits restlessly reside. His images work to humanize the youth that have committed crimes or entered into the system by means of bad luck and accident of birth. Photographed and printed at a large-scale, these works catch you in their gaze and invite the viewer to see the innate human potential that the facilities' architecture denies.

A 23-year-strong photojournalist for TIME Magazine, Steve Liss spent 2 years photographing and interviewing detainees, their parents, correction officers and counselors in Laredo, Texas. This work resulted in his book No Place for Children, published in 2005 by University of Texas Press. The youth in his black and white images suffer from drug dependencies, mental illness, depression, and violence. Pictures of a 10 year-old boy in an oversized uniform confined to an oversized cinder block cell crying for his mother in confusion encapsulate the contents of this vast project. Liss has captured the heartbreaking realities of the youngest incarcerated children and the cruelties they face.

Captured Youth by Steve Davis

No Place for Children by Steve Liss

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The volume of Richard Ross' project Juveniles-In-Justice declares itself an institution. For 8 years Ross has photographed and interviewed in 31 states and 200+ facilities, a project that has yielded 10,000+ images and 1000+ interviews. His images are paired with interviews to illustrate the multidimensional personalities of each inmate. The sight of isolation cells and restraint devices give cold and firm weight to the trauma inflicted by the prison state on hundreds of thousands of young people. Ross will also be presenting new work from two series that have evolved from his Juveniles-in-Justice project.

A practicing documentary maker and video artist for over fifteen years, Tirtza Even has produced both linear and interactive video work representing the less overt manifestations of complex and sometimes extreme social/political dynamics in specific locations (e.g. Palestine, Turkey, Spain, the U.S. and Germany, among others). Even’s work has appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, at the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, as well as in many other galleries, museums and festivals in the United States, Israel and Europe, including Rotterdam Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival and The New York Video Festival, Lincoln Center. It has won numerous grants and awards, including Fledgling Funds; Artadia Awards, Chicago (winner of top award); Golden Gate Awards Certificate of Merit, San Francisco International Film Festival; Best Experimental Film, Syracuse Film Festival; Media Arts Award, The Jerome Foundation; First Prize, L’immagine Leggera Festival, Italy; Individual Artists Program Awards, NYSCA, and many others; and has been purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Jewish Museum (NY), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), among others. She has been an invited guest and featured speaker at many conferences and university programs, including the Whitney Museum Seminar series, the Digital Flaherty Seminar, Art Pace annual panel, ACM Multimedia, the Performance Studies International conference (PSI), the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference (SLSA) and others. Even’s work is distributed by Heure Exquise, France, Video Data Bank (VDB), USA, and Groupe Intervention Video (GIV), Canada. Currently an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department. Steve Davis is a documentary portrait and landscape photographer based in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Russian Esquire. His work is in many collections, including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Seattle Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the George Eastman House. He is a former 1st place recipient of the Santa Fe CENTER Project Competition, and two time winner of Washington Arts Commission/Artist Trust Fellowships. Davis is the Coordinator of Photography, media curator and adjunct faculty member of The Evergreen State College. He is represented by the James Harris Gallery, Seattle. Steve Liss is currently an Associate Professor of Media at Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts. For twenty-three years he was a Time magazine staff photographer, where, as a licensed pilot, he flew himself to and from assignments across the United States. Forty-three of his photographs have appeared on the cover of Time and he has produced dozens of award-winning photographic essays and photographed six presidential campaigns for the magazine. His book, No Place for Children: Voices from Juvenile Detention won the Robert F. Kennedy

Girls by Richard Ross

David Weinberg Photography | 300 West Superior Street | Suite 203 | Chicago, IL | 60654 4

Award for Journalism and the World Understanding Award from Pictures of the Year International. The Chicago Tribune called it “photojournalism of the most moral and galvanizing kind.” Steve’s work is housed in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. and is included in The Greatest Images of the Twentieth Century, published by Time/Life Books. A life-long advocate for social justice, Steve was a Soros Justice Fellow, an Alicia Patterson Fellow and, most recently, a Fellow in the Ascend Program at the Aspen Institute. Steve recently produced and directed “Finding Fatherhood,” a documentary short that premiered on Rocky Mountain PBS Television in January 2015. Prior to joining the faculty at Endicott College, Steve taught graduate photojournalism at Northwestern University and multimedia production at Columbia College Chicago. Richard Ross's works have been exhibited in museums worldwide. His books include Juvenile in Justice, Museology, Gathering Light, Waiting for the End of the World, and Architecture of Authority. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and has received awards and grants from the MacArthur Foundation, Fulbright, the NEA, Center for Innovation, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation. He is Distinguished Professor of Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Exhibition Programming: Impact Night February 12, 6-9 pm A ticketed event featuring a panel discussion with Ben Wolf, Director of the Institutional Reform Project at the ACLU of Illinois, photographer Richard Ross, and Xavier McElrath-Bey, who was incarcerated as a youth and currently works as a Youth Justice Advocate with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. 100% of ticket sales will benefit the ACLU of Illinois Children’s Rights Initiative, part of the Institutional Reform Project, which seeks to create fair conditions and due process for young people incarcerated in Illinois. Beverages sponsored by Solemn Oath Brewery. Opening Reception February 13, 5-8 pm An informal reception to celebrate the opening of the group exhibition, Try Youth As Youth. This event is free and open to the public. Screening: Natural Life March 12, 6-8 pm A theater style screening of Tirtza Even’s experimental documentary, Natural Life. The piece challenges inequities in the juvenile justice system by depicting, through documentation and reenactment, the stories of five individuals who were incarcerated for life without parole (“natural life”) for crimes they committed as youth. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the artist, ACLU Legislative Counsel Khadine Bennett, and a phone conversation with one of the inmates featured in Even’s video. Using Impact Litigation to End the New Jim Crow March 20, 12-1:30 pm This lunchtime panel will feature ACLU lawyers discussing their use of impact litigation to force systemic changes to broken and entrenched state institutions. Continuing legal education credit will be provided. Curator Walk-Through May 9th, 1-3pm A guided tour of the exhibition with curator Meg Noe. More info on exhibition programming can be found at: www.d-weinberg.com/tyay

David Weinberg Photography | 300 West Superior Street | Suite 203 | Chicago, IL | 60654 5

David Weinberg Photography is a gallery with the mission to educate and inform the public on issues of social justice. The gallery aims to provide an engaging environment for discourse on critical contemporary issues that concern the community. Joining artists with organizations in support and solidarity of their cause, the gallery works to produce tangible change and cultivate a culture of consciousness. A passion for education drives a developing photographic workshop program that aims to help high school students visualize their future through the medium of photography. The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois is the principal protector of constitutional rights

in Illinois, a distinction the organization has held since its founding in 1929. The ACLU is dedicated to protecting the liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the state Constitution, and state/federal human rights laws. Its advocacy is legendary in the areas of racial justice, religious liberty, freedom of expression, the rights of children and

people with disabilities, criminal justice reform, fairness for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender individuals, and reproductive justice. With a membership of more than 20,000 in Illinois – and 550,000 across the country – the ACLU accomplishes its goals through litigation, lobbying, public policy reform, and educating the public on a broad array of civil liberties issues.