A Liberated Library for Education, Inspiration, and Action
Undocumented Project
Lennon Wall, Gongguan, Taipei, Taiwan
Lightbox Photo Library
risis and racial reckoning, are re-thinking what is needed to make communities truly healthy and safe. This library of zines, booklets, and guides created by artists and community organizations based in Chicago provides tools, vision, and inspiration for community transformation.
Chicago has a long history of intervention toward community transformation. The artists and community organizations in this temporary library continue the Chicago legacy of reimagining communities through intervention, education, and creativity. Community organizers and artists, in their resistance to neglect and state-sanctioned violence, present these zines and share knowledge gained from local action, so that we all can imagine the communities of the future and the steps we need to take to get there.
Since our current crises in public health, racial justice, and democratic institutions have deep roots, these publications respond to the events of 2020, but may have been made many years prior. Their relevance today only makes their information more urgent. Browse the pages and find information to help defend democratic principles, learn about actions that challenge state-sanctioned violence, policing, and prisons, and examples of how to defend human rights.
Know a zine created by an artist or community organization that should be added to the temporary library? Email the name and title to rossjordanart@gmail.com. As the exhibition travels, the temporary library can grow.
－Curator｜Ross Jordan
Lennon Wall, Gongguan, Taipei, Taiwan
For the Southern Taipei version, this work is exhibited at Lightbox Photo Library and has exclusively included two works that respond to the project call to action by Ross Jordan. One is a collection of nearly 740 photographs taken by artist Pin-Hua Chen at the Gongguan underground passage in Taipei during 2019; another is an art zine by a Hong Kong artist based in Germany.
Curator : Ross Jordan
Ross Jordan is Curatorial Manager at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago, IL. He is a curator interested in the confluence of American politics, visual culture, and artistic production. Since coming to Chicago in 2010, first as a graduate student and then as a full-time staff member of SAIC’s Department of Exhibitions and Exhibitions Studies, Ross expanded curricular exhibitions on the campus and transformed graduate and undergraduate led exhibitions and programs into research driven and collaborative experiences. Ross also made himself a vital presence in Chicago’s art community curating six independent exhibitions over the last five years in several of Chicago’s tenacious arts venues. Previously, Ross was a 12-month intern in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art where he was a contributor to the museum’s blog Inside/Out and provided research support for exhibitions including Lee Bontecou: All Freedom in Every Sense (2010), Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art (2011) and Abstract Expressionist New York (2011). Ross is the recipient of the Studio Art Fellowship, Trinity College; the Graduate Curatorial Fellowship, SAIC; a 2015 ACRE Curatorial Fellowship; and was a 2014/15 inaugural curator-in-residence at the Chicago Cultural Center.
