Printing T-shirt Art on Chicago Channel 21 Tells of Torture
For those who are unaware, Richard Daley was State’s Attorney when the news began to surface that John Burge and his fellow Chicago Police officers were using a broad variety of torture techniques to solve high profile murder cases in order to force confessions from innocent men in Chicago. They preyed on African American men who had no money and little community support. This left the real killers loose and condemned many innocent men to Death Row. When the news reached Daley he should have investigated it and put a stop to it by indicting John Burge. Daley buried the news and did nothing allowing the torture to continue.
(The deep thing about this print is I get all these colors with just one pull of the squeegee. In this technique the artist must control and understand how the ink mixes. I - personally - like to have a little spill of yellow ink in the corner of my screen to snatch a bit of on a tiny tear of post-card stock to dab a slap of yellow between two colors that are not mixing to my taste.)
This story is long and implicates many people still in power in Chicago today. It is still unfolding. It is an international issue and a huge disgrace to Chicago and the United States of America. Burge learned to torture people in Viet Nam as a soldier then brought his techniques home to Chicago where his methods of solving murder cases found support in some political corners. This history means that we will need to be alert to a future generation of torturers loosed among us if we do not as a society take a stand against torture in the ranks of our police and our troops. We should very aware that torture at home starts with tolerating torture of the people our armed forces were sent to liberate who then come home to become police officers. All the good work of responsible officers is lost when renegades like this are defended beyond all reasonable doubt. We must demand answers from our officials. Daley must testify!
On July 16th I printed this patch while describing how to screen print on Chicago cable access Channel 21 on our Monday night series entitled “Printing T-shirt Art” airing from 6:30-7:00 through the months of July, August and September.
Woven into explanations of screen-printing I talked about the conflict between 1st Amendment case law and our Chicago municipal code licensing speech under the category of itinerant merchant. Essentially, Daley took away significant 1st amendment rights from artists and other citizens in 1994 when municipal code changes supported by him lumped artists and others selling speech in with peddlers and itinerant merchants requiring us (citizens) to have a peddler’s license to sell speech in Chicago. Along with that significant change peddlers were banned from selling anywhere close to the Loop, within 1000 feet of any sports stadium and in many other parts of the city.
Some Aldermen later followed Daley’s lead and banned peddlers from selling in significant portions of their ward and one Alderman banned peddlers from his ward completely. Did anybody complain that this banned speech as well? Did the press ignore the issue of free speech when it came to artists’ rights? These are questions to be answered - anyone who signs-in can comment.
You can be sure the media never ignores free speech rights when its their speech rights that are infringed upon. It is in fact the rights newspapers enjoy to be able to sell their speech on the streets of the city that is the model for what our rights as artists and citizens should be. Where ever the news is sold - artists should be able to sell art.
Did they think that we could ignore this rape of our rights forever and still go on bragging about our freedoms around the world? Look for a copy of a previous Chicago Police Department “Special Order” from 1979 explaining our rights as they were then, and should be today, to be posted on this blog very soon.