A proposal for a $60 million film studio in South Shore backed by TV producer Derek Dudley, whose credits include the Showtime series “The Chi,” got a thumbs-up Thursday from a city planning agency.

The Chicago Plan Commission unanimously backed zoning for the complex on 7 acres at 7731 S. South Chicago Ave. With investors that include James Reynolds Jr., chairman of Chicago-based Loop Capital Markets, Dudley said the project could anchor a South Side entertainment district that would include the nearby Avalon Regal Theater.

“I grew up on the South Side. This has been a dream of mine for several years,” Dudley told the plan commission. “I was fortunate to get into the entertainment business, which afforded me great opportunities” that include a chance for give back to the community, he said.

Dudley said the project would be “monumental in terms of being able to expand the film industry business and make Chicago the Hollywood of the Midwest.”

The commission’s vote was one of several it took to green-light major projects. Its packed agenda included approval of more than 400 housing units on the former site of the ABLA Homes public housing project at Roosevelt Road and Racine Avenue.

The file studio would take over an empty, triangular parcel near the Chicago Skyway. Years ago, it was the site of a Kmart.

Through his company, Regal Mile Ventures, Dudley hopes to start construction later this year. It passed an important hurdle with the plan commission vote and the project now heads to the City Council for approval.

“The community is totally excited about this project,” said Ald. Leslie Hairston (5^th), who brought it to several community meetings. City officials said the process led to several improvements in the plan, such as more trees and landscaping and the addition of a public plaza.

They said the complex could support around 300 production jobs when it’s in full use.

Zoning documents show Dudley has the support of an owner of the property, Kmart, now part of a spinoff from Sears Holdings. The city owns a portion of the land, and on Tuesday the Community Development Commission agreed to sell it to Regal Mile for $31,000.

Getty Images

Dudley, who works closely with the rapper and actor Common, hopes to profit from increasing demand for production space, driven by streaming services in search of original programming. In Chicago, film production is dominated by the Cinespace studios, which have been expanded and currently host Dudley’s “The Chi.”

A website for Dudley’s development cites Netflix, Disney and Amazon as having interest in doing more production work in Chicago.

The website also highlights a potential revival of the Avalon Regal, also recently called the New Regal, at 1641 E. 79^th St. With an auditorium of 2,250 seats, the theater has been little used for years. The 1927 building is a city landmark and in its heyday was a busy stage for African American performers.

Dudley could not be reached for details about that aspect of the plan.

Regal owner Jerald Gary said in 2019 that rapper Kanye West pledged $1 million to help reopen the theater. It’s not known if the contribution came through.

Other items the commission endorsed, sending them to the City Council, included:

–Related Midwest’s plan to expand mixed-income housing at the ABLA site. It calls for three new buildings and several renovated buildings, with a blend of market-rate and reduced-rent units, and others for the Chicago Housing Authority tenants. It calls for 222 new and 184 rehabbed apartments, with estimated completion in spring 2023.

–A $145 million RIU Hotel at 150 E. Ontario St., currently an empty lot. It would contain 388 rooms.

–Two new residential buildings, 19 and 9 stories, at 3636 N. Lake Shore Drive, a rare open site near the lakefront, from developer Jonathan Holtzman. The project was approved despite criticism of the architecture.

–Two projects in the Fulton Market area. They are a 34-story residential building, 20% of them classified as affordable, at 1215 W. Fulton Market, and an 11-story office building at 917 W. Fulton Market.

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Rank-and-file Chicago police officers would receive a 10.5 % retroactive pay raise and 9.5% more through January 2025, under a tentative agreement on an eight-year contract that Mayor Lori Lightfoot has refused to acknowledge, a union negotiator said Thursday.

Earlier this week, the mayor told reporters Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara, her nemesis on all issues pertaining to law enforcement, “simply wasn’t correct” in a YouTube video he posted declaring the FOP had finally reached a tentative agreement with the Chicago Police Department.

But Paul Vallas, the former mayoral city budget director and mayoral challenger who has served as an unpaid member of the FOP’s negotiating team, said Thursday it is Lightfoot who was mistaken.

“It was agreed that last Thursday’s strategic bargaining session was intended to conclude the agreement for which the Mayor and the City Council would have the final sign off. If the Mayor is now saying that there is no deal, she is rejecting an agreement negotiated by her own team. Let’s hope that’s not the case,” Vallas wrote Thursday on his Facebook page.

Vallas said the new eight-year contract has two phases.

Phase One is an agreement on officer compensation that also addresses what Vallas called the mayor’s “core accountability issues.” Phase Two will “take much more time to resolve,” presumably because it includes the most controversial disciplinary changes that “may end up in arbitration,” Vallas wrote.

“The consensus was that it was important to get the financial issues resolved and have accountability provisions that mirrored the city’s agreement with the sergeants, with some clarifications,” Vallas wrote, without revealing specifics.

Vallas described the financial agreement as a 20% increase for rank-and-file police officers — 22% “when compounded.” The city also agreed to increase so-called “duty availability pay” to $950 per quarter and raise the annual uniform allowance to $1,950.

Duty availability pay will be offered “retroactively” from July 2017 to all officers whose probation period has ended after 18 months. Going forward, duty availability pay will be available after 18 months, instead of after 42 months.

On health care, Vallas said rank-and-file police officers will be asked to absorb half the increase in health care contributions imposed on police sergeants and Chicago firefighters and paramedics. The “second half” of that increase will be “postponed until July 1, 2022 to allow members to retire under under current terms: 2.2% at age 55 and 0% for those 60 and over.

In a text message to the Sun-Times, Vallas wouldn’t pinpoint the contract’s overall cost to Chicago taxpayers or reveal the average retroactive paycheck.

But his Facebook post described the cost as “reasonable” and noted the cost is “inflated by the fact that it is equivalent to TWO combined contracts. … Those who will respond to the contract cost need to remember and acknowledge this.”

The city has put money away each year, preparing to cover that eventual retro pay, he added, so the contract “should not require an increase in taxes. Nor should it delay the filling of police vacancies in order to have the needed financing,” he wrote.

The mayor’s office had no immediate comment.

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Chicago taxpayers could spend $1.2 million to compensate the family of a teenager killed by a police officer after a foot chase, though an investigation of the shooting didn’t result in any disciplinary action.

The proposed legal settlement is the largest of three tied to allegations of police wrongdoing on Monday’s agenda of the City Council’s finance committee.

The payout would go to the family of 16-year-old Pierre Loury, shot to death on April 11, 2016 after he ran from a car pulled over by Chicago police officers in the 3400 block of West Grenshaw Avenue in North Lawndale, about a block away from Loury’s home.

At the time, police said the car was stopped because it matched the description of one involved in a shooting earlier that day, and the officer fired at Loury as the teen turned toward him holding a pistol.

The shooting was investigated by the now-defunct Independent Police Review Authority, which ruled the shooting was within police policy and recommended no disciplinary action for Chicago Officer Sean Hitz, who chased and shot Loury.

According to court records, Hitz was in the police academy last year to become a detective. He had taken the promotional exam in 2016 and made the hiring list for detective in 2020.

“He makes a promotion list while this case is going on?” U.S. District Judge Sharon Coleman asked the attorneys representing the city in a hearing in March 2020. “City, the optics of that look really bad. I’m glad. Good for him.”

The Loury family had demanded IPRA release official police video of the shooting, but it was withheld because he was a minor.

Days after the shooting, a law-enforcement source told the Sun-Times Loury was carrying a gun that fell from his waistband as he scaled a fence during the chase.

Videos posted to social media after the shooting appeared to show Loury’s clothing had gotten snagged on the fence.

In a deposition, Hitz said he saw a gun in Loury’s right hand while he on top of the fence. Then Loury dived off the fence and landed on the gun, Hitz said.

“He retrieved the gun and all in one motion turned around and pointed the gun at me,” Hitz added. “At that point, I fired twice.”

The medical examiner’s officer concluded Loury died from a bullet wound to the chest.

After the shooting, Loury’s mother, Tambrasha Hudson, said: “It wasn’t like him, he wouldn’t do that.”

In the hours after Loury’s death, conflicting portraits emerged.

Then-Deputy Police Supt. John Escalante told reporters Loury was a documented gang member who had “prior contact” with police, and a gun was found at the scene. In postings on Facebook and Instagram, Loury posed with what appear to be pistols or with friends brandishing guns.

Family and friends painted Loury as teen who aspired to a career as a rapper — a vocation he tried to fuel with videos posted to YouTube and Facebook under the names “Pierre Santana,” “Polo” and “Shorty Lo.”

Sun-Times Media

Classmates said Loury had steady attendance at Chicago Christian Alternative Academy and was quiet and reserved at school.

In a March 18, 2016 Facebook post, Loury wrote, “Always Worried Bout Da Police . . . I’m Focused On Keepin My Life… Rather Be In Jail Than Dead Anyday.”

Two days later, he posted a link to a newspaper article about the arrest of 18-year-old Dwon Wright on charges connected to a gang-related shooting that left three men wounded. “Free My F–in Boy,” Loury captioned the post.

A month after suing the city, Loury’s family filed an amended complaint saying then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel might be called to testify about the alleged “code of silence” in the Chicago Police Department if the lawsuit ever went to trial.

The amended complaint also accused Hitz and another officer of conspiring to give a false account of the shooting to cover up their misconduct by claiming Loury “placed them in imminent fear of bodily harm.” The lawsuit said Chicago police engaged in long-standing and racist practices that “result in the unjustified deaths of people of color.”

Andrew Stroth, the attorney for Loury’s family, declined to comment on the proposed settlement.

Sun-Times file

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Deceptive practices during the interrogation of minors would be barred under a bill Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed into law Thursday, one piece of legislation aimed at advancing “the rights of some of our most vulnerable” in the state’s criminal justice system.

“Together, this package of initiatives moves us closer to a holistic criminal justice system, one that builds confidence and trust in a system that has done harm to too many people for too long,” Pritzker said at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law.

Terrill Swift, one of the so-called “Englewood Four” accused of the rape and murder of Nina Glover in 1994, said police lied to him and his family — first about where they were taking him, then about the crime and his connection to the three others convicted of the killing.

Swift was 17 at the time. He spent 15 1/2 years in prison before he was exonerated.

“This bill, I truly believe, could have saved my life,” Swift said, choking up. “When it was first brought to me, it touched me in the sense that it could have saved my life.”

Pritzker signed three other pieces of legislation addressing parts of the criminal justice system:

o Allows state’s attorneys to petition a court to re-sentence someone whose original sentence “no longer advances the interests of justice.”

o Bars anything said or done during a restorative justice hearing from being used against someone in court unless that protection is waived.

o Creates a re-sentencing task force to study ways to reduce the state’s prison population through re-sentencing motions.

Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx told the Chicago Sun-Times her office collaborated with the Innocence Project and For the People to draft the legislation banning the use of deceptive practices during the interrogation of minors and the bill that would allow county prosecutors to seek new sentences for offenders.

“It’s important for us to not just have proactive policies, but to go back and look at some of the harms that were caused by the things that happened before we got here,” Foxx said of the criminal justice reforms signed into law Thursday.

“We had so many wrongful convictions, particularly of youth, that were predicated on these practices of lying to children, where the science … tells us about their susceptibility to those types of practices and the damage that can be done,” Foxx said. “When we convict people who are not the people who have done the actual crime, it not only robs them of their lives, from their families and from their communities, it also allows the people who’ve actually committed the crimes to go free.”

Sen. Robert Peters, D-Chicago, called the package of criminal justice legislation “a major step in the right direction.”

“We must not waste the potential of our fellow neighbors by locking them up and throwing away the key,” said Peters, a lead sponsor on all of the pieces of legislation signed Thursday.

“We see systemic failures over and over again. We’re promised public safety, and yet it seems like it’s something we chase over and over again,” Peters said. “Chicago sports teams have better draft records than tough-on-crime policies have on providing safety. It is time that we move towards a new era of public safety — public safety for all, public safety by the people, public safety that belongs to us.”

Rep. Justin Slaughter, D-Chicago, who was a lead sponsor on the bills in the House. said no matter where people fall on the criminal justice reform spectrum, “we can all agree that innocent people should not be serving time in prison.”

Swift said while the new law will likely help minors avoid a situation like the one he faced, there is still work to be done to decrease wrongful convictions.

“The reality is, I can’t get what I lost back,” Swift said.

“We don’t need another Terrill Swift, Michael Saunders … this happens so much and it’s something that needs to change. Granted, this bill passing is a great step, but we still have so much work to do.”

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After being the only regional sports network to send its broadcasters to road games in the first half of the MLB season, Marquee Sports Network is planning to travel for roughly half of the Cubs’ trips in the second half.

“The driver of our situation is to be safe and health-conscious wherever we can, so we can’t justify making every road trip,” Marquee general manager Mike McCarthy said. “There are some realities to some of the cities that the Cubs go to that make it difficult to contemplate traveling the announcers.

“It’s not, as some suggested, budget-related or tone-deafness about what makes or doesn’t make a good broadcast. There’s some realities that some cities are easier for our situation that we want to pull off with technology than others are.”

Marquee sent Jon “Boog” Sciambi and Jim Deshaies to Milwaukee in June and Chris Myers and Deshaies to Cincinnati in July. Both cities are home to RSNs in the Bally Sports network, owned by Sinclair, which jointly owns Marquee.

The Cubs’ road trip that starts Friday is to Phoenix and St. Louis. Both cities also are home to a Bally Sports RSN, but Marquee might travel only to St. Louis, if at all. The Chicago Department of Public Health added Missouri to its travel advisory list this week “amid an increase in COVID-19 cases.”

“Sometimes if it’s challenging, you have to make decisions,” McCarthy said. “I don’t think anybody would question whether we understand the value [of traveling]. We can only do it where we can do it. It’s a daily evolving situation. We’re going to do it as often as we can within parameters.”

Sciambi has been outspoken about his desire to travel.

“Whether fans care or not, my being at the ballpark and having access to the players enhances your viewing experience. I’m telling you it does,” he said. “I’m going to deliver and we as a network are going to deliver a better product, and ultimately the league needs to get involved because we’re delivering their product.

“So at a certain point the league needs to say to all these RSNs, ‘Hey, you need to get out on the road and start telling these stories,’ because if they keep locking people in broom closets to make the broadcasting better, it’s going to negatively impact how people experience the sports and we will feel it.”

Said McCarthy: “He knows that the passion is shared. You want guys to push the envelope. You want people to be demanding and exacting about perfection. And he is.

“As I say to Boog all the time, ‘There’s this pandemic. It’s in all the papers.’ “

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About six female lifeguards at Chicago Park District pools and beaches were sexually harassed and assaulted by male co-workers, with some of the harassment taking place in front of children, an internal investigation has concluded.

The explosive allegations, including an attempted rape, are in a report released Thursday by Park District Inspector General Elaine Little that hints at a cover-up.

All three male lifeguards who were accused no longer work for the Park District. Two resigned during the investigation to avoid being fired. The third resigned earlier this year.

Of the six victims, two have filed police reports. The others, including the victim of the attempted rape, did not file criminal charges, fearing retaliation.

The allegations were first reported by WBEZ-FM (91.5).

Sources said the first sexual misconduct complaint was referred to Park District Supt. Mike Kelly in February 2020. But it wasn’t until a second complaint was referred to Kelly by the mayor’s office that the superintendent forwarded it to Little for a full investigation.

As always with internal investigations, neither the victims nor the subjects of the investigation are identified in the report. Nor does the report say where the alleged attacks occurred. Other investigative sources have identified the locations as Welles Park, Jefferson Park and North Avenue Beach and said the attacks occurred as early as 2016 and as recently as 2019.

Among the allegations in the graphic report:

o A veteran male lifeguard also accused of drinking while on duty at North Avenue Beach forced an underage rookie female lifeguard to perform oral sex on him before he tried to rape her, then physically threatened both her and a friend she told about the attack.

In “detailed and corroborated testimony,” the woman told investigators the man “sexually abused and sexually assaulted” her while driving her home from work in 2018. Although the man had “repeatedly sexually harassed his victim while they were on duty together,” she “reluctantly took him up on his offer” of a ride home after she “unexpectedly found herself without transportation from work,” the report states.

“As they were approaching her house, Subject 2 parked his automobile on the side of the street, refused to let his victim exit the vehicle and directed her to give him oral sex while threatening to ‘make her life miserable’ if she refused,” the report states.

The victim “initially rebuffed” her attacker, but ultimately “acquiesced” to his demands only because he was a “more senior lifeguard” who, she firmly believed, could “deliver on his threat,” the report states.

“Subject 2 then suddenly forced himself on top of her, fondled her breasts and genitalia without her consent and attempted to rape her,” the report states.

The attack continued until the victim screamed. The male lifeguard then “let her exit” the vehicle.

Apparently unafraid of being caught, the male lifeguard continued to sexually harass his victim for a full year after the attempted rape, the report states.

At the year-end banquet, he allegedly nominated her to receive an award for “Slut of the Beach.”

The report also concluded the male lifeguard violated the employee code of conduct by “possessing and consuming alcohol” while on duty at North Avenue Beach.

“In detailed and credible testimony, a lifeguard told OIG that, while on beach duty at the 2018 Air & Water Show, he/she saw Subject 2 drink alcoholic beverages to the point where he was obviously intoxicated,” the report states.

“Specifically, the lifeguard recounted Subject 2 stumbled and swayed while patrolling the beach and reeked of alcohol.”

o A veteran seasonal male lifeguard allegedly molested two female co-workers — one at the Portage Park pool in 2016 and the second at the Jefferson Park pool in 2018.

In the 2016 attack in Portage Park, the woman was “attempting to take a pre-shift nap” in the women’s locker room when the male lifeguard came in, laid down next to her and “fondled her breasts and genitalia over her clothing,” the report states.

The fondling allegedly continued even after the woman “attempted to push his hands away from her body,” the report states. The female lifeguard also accused her male abuser of “repeatedly sexually harassing her” by “constantly asking her whether she had ever had sex.”

Two years later, the male lifeguard was at it again — this time at the Jefferson Park pool.

As his second victim was changing in a storage room, the male lifeguard barged in, closed the door behind him, pinned the victim against lockers and “forcefully sexually abused and assaulted her,” ignoring her pleas.

Both before and after the alleged attack, the male lifeguard “propositioned her to enter into a sexual relationship” and made “numerous unwelcomed comments about her buttocks” and his genitalia, the report states.

o The third incident of harassment — with three female victims — allegedly occurred at Welles Park in 2018 and 2019. One victim told investigators that “on several occasions and in the presence of several child patrons,” the male lifeguard “commented on the view that her shorts afforded of her buttocks.”

The male lifeguard was further accused of telling one victim that female lifeguards “should wrestle in their swimsuits while he sprayed them with water because the scene ‘would be so sexy,'” the report states.

When the third victim asked him to stop making lewd comments about her and other women, “He threatened to revoke the time off that he had already approved” for her, just as he had “threatened to retaliate” against another victim, the IG said.

During the investigation, the inspector general learned the male lifeguard had been fired from a lifeguard’s job at Chicago Public Schools and placed on the CPS “do not hire” list for making “inappropriate and uncomfortable advances” toward two female high school students.

CPS told the Park District — but not until February 2020, when he was assigned to a Park District pool on CPS property.

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Carmela Richardson has lost four family members over the last four years.

Her husband, her mother-in-law, a daughter and, last week, her 19-year-old son.

Myron Richardson was found in the trunk of a burning car on the Far South Side with a gunshot wound to his head. That’s all the family knows about his murder.

Repeated calls to a detective have gone unanswered, they say, and a supervisor even hung up on them.

Provided

“I just want to know what happened to him,” Richardson, 39, said through tears. “They just think Myron is another Black kid who just got slain in the street, and that’s not my baby,” she said through tears.

“He was raised to be a good man,” she continued. “I talked to my son every day. I told him I love him, he was a good big brother, good boyfriend…they don’t know who Myron was … We have to let them know who my baby was.”

The body of her son was found after someone reported a car fire around 10:30 p.m. July 6. Emergency crews responded to the 12100 block of South Doty Avenue, near the Bishop Ford Expressway, and found Richardson’s burned body in the trunk of the car. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

An autopsy showed he died of a gunshot wound to his head and his death was ruled a homicide by the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

Richardson’s mother said she spoke with a Chicago police detective for over an hour on July 8, two days after her son’s death. Since then, the Richardson family says they have tried to reach him at least five times, but were either left on hold for up to half an hour or were hung up on.

“I took it personal because Myron is my son,” Richardson said. “It wasn’t personal, they don’t know who Myron is.”

Richardson’s frustration came to a head on July 10 when she said she called for the detective and spoke to an official who told her, “I don’t have time for this” and hung up.

A police spokesman told the Sun-Times he would check with the detective, then later said the department would have no comment at all on Richardson’s complaint. Police have reported no one in custody.

Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times

The Richardsons are not alone in searching for information about the death of their loved ones. Chicago police have reported 362 homicides so far this year, but arrests have only been made in 68 cases, according to public data.

“So many people get killed in Chicago, and they just don’t seem like they care,” Myron’s aunt Jeanetta Richardson, 40, said. “I can only imagine how overwhelmed the police must be, but you got parents out here that don’t care and you got parents out here that do care, and the ones that do care, I feel like you should at least give them a little bit of peace and do your part of your job.”

Carmela Richardson’s fiance Prince Elston, 40, said he understands that police deal with victims’ families daily, “but there’s certain levels of respect people should have for one another, especially going through a time like this.”

Carmela Richardson said she hopes detectives understand her son was a good kid and will bring his killer to justice.

“He wasn’t that person, he didn’t live that life,” she said. “So now I have to let them know who Myron was…I just want to know what happened to him.”

Richardson played basketball for Morgan Park High School and enjoyed playing video games. He was the oldest of seven and was described by his aunt as “someone who lit up whatever room he was in.”

“My nephew always had this smile on his face,” she said. “He was a very, very happy guy, very respectful…even when he was in trouble, he was smiling.”

Richardson often bought his mother roses, knowing her love for them. For his service, the family plans to have roses to honor the tradition. “He was just a joy to be around,” his aunt said.

Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times

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Facebook.gov… Biden’s administration is flagging posts on Facebook and having them deleted

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By Richard Davis,
today at 4:24 pm

We already know that Democrats and the Left (one and the same) do not like the Second Amendment but with the lastest admission of Jen (Peppermint Patty) Psaki that those whom the Executive Office of the President and the Surgeon General’s Office decide are spreading “disinformation” about Covid vaccines will have their First Amendment rights terminated.

Psaki stated:

“We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s Office. We are flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”

Have we now entered into the dangerous world of Facebook.gov where the government is censoring speech? Have we arrived at state-run media?

Any old-fashioned “liberals” have a problem with this, or have you all sold your souls to the Party?

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Biden, Covid misinformation, facebook censorship, facebook.gov

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‘I am not nervous at all’ Inspiration4 Crew Member Hayley Arceneaux Talks to WGN News About Upcoming Mission

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By Sophie Sanchez,
today at 4:30 pm

Hayley Arceneaux, the youngest crew member of Inspiration4, and youngest astronaut to go to space, spoke to WGN News about her upcoming mission this morning. Arceneaux is a cancer survivor, physician’s assistant, and current astronaut in training after being named to the Inspiration4 crew earlier this year.

The fundraising launch for St. Jude was organized by billionaire Jared Isaacman and will be the first all civilian space mission to space. After an online competition, Arceneaux and Isaacman will be joined by Dr. Sian Proctor and Christopher Sembroski.

Hayley Arceneaux appeared on WGN 9 news team this morning to speak about her astronaut training, mission specifics, and her confidence in SpaceX and crewmates for a successful mission. The primary goal of the three day mission is to raise awareness for St. Jude, but the crew will also be performing research during their time onboard Crew Dragon. Currently the crew of four is splitting their time between SpaceX headquarters and other training centers around the country.

When asked if she was scared, Arceneaux replied, “I am not nervous at all. I think I’ll have some butterflies on launch day, but as of now I have such faith in SpaceX. I know that we are going to be in great hands.” The crew will actually be traveling further into space than current crewed missions do, orbiting at 311 miles above Earth. NASA, ESA, JAXA, and Russian astronauts and cosmonauts launch to the International Space Station where they orbit the Earth 254 miles high.

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A few years ago, in my former neighborhood in Queens, I passed an ornamental column amid the sidewalk trash. Regret prompted me to backtrack and haul the plaster orphan home. It’s since moved with me to Chicago, where, bearing a pothos, it receives many compliments.

Columns, particularly of the classical order, have a powerful allure. They are elegant, evoke high art, and can feel beguiling, as I realized on that summer stroll. They can seem incongruous in our surroundings, particularly on a city sidewalk. Columns are really everywhere though: decorating banks, colleges, museums, and federal buildings throughout the country.

This all might seem obvious, but artist Kelly Kristin Jones knows there’s something more insidious behind the ubiquity of columns. “They are symbols used by white people to reinforce power,” she said when we spoke in June. “It’s so ingrained that we’re not conscious of why they’re so heavily used throughout our built spaces.”

Jones has spent several years interrogating the prevalence of such markers in the U.S., focusing on public (and taxpayer-maintained) monuments to long-dead white men that have fueled national debate–and, in Chicago, a public arts reevaluation. For her ongoing work In time and paradise, Jones documents herself and others while they hold up photographs of the sky in front of local statues that depict controversial people. In the course of these performances, Jones does not identify the subjects of the statues for the viewer, which invites us to imagine the possibilities of who should be memorialized atop the pedestals. The resulting documentation makes it appear as though the original statues have been erased, echoing the darkroom technique of dodging.

While Jones was cooped indoors last year, she began thinking about ideologies of whiteness that are baked into everyday domestic life. She bought ornamental columns from local sellers on Craigslist and Facebook, made of cheap materials such as plastic, wood, plaster, or metal. The growing stockpile of columns is the centerpiece of Jones’s show “We forgot the moon while holding up the sun” at Bridgeport’s 062 gallery in the Zhou B Art Center. The resulting piece, Orders of Empire, features dozens of columns spilling from a corner to evoke an ancient ruin. The exhibition, which also includes photography, works to untangle the pervasive legacies of white supremacy that haunt in plain sight; to show that a column is not just a column.

The crux of this systemic architectural sleight is the white and Right-wing obsession with antiquity. Rutgers professor Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro wrote that ancient Greeks and Romans “affirmed the ancient nobility and capacity for rule of the white race, while also offering a model of righteous empire and civilized slave ownership.” Monteiro outlines this in her essay “Power Structures: White Columns, White Marble, White Supremacy,” which she posted on Medium in October 2020. Monteiro tells us that the so-called founding fathers “. . . set their heritage claims in stone,” and traces the incessant formation of white national identity from Thomas Jefferson (whose plantation Monticello has become a byword for whitewashed histories of enslavement) to the farcical tradition of plantation weddings, and from the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville (which revolved around a Robert E. Lee statue) to Trump’s “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” executive order. Neoclassical architecture, Monteiro writes, was and remains a way for white men to “[seed] the landscape with the signs of the European past–of European heritage–quite literally marking the territory of whiteness.”

Jones’s work seeks to avoid didacticism and invites us to excavate the calculated history of unbalanced power simply by making it immense and inescapable. She collects and calls attention to the bread crumbs of this history beyond the south, still largely the focus of today’s debates over monuments. Interestingly, her column sellers all live in predominantly white, western, and northern Chicago suburbs. They’re also all white women. “I realized that that was the work,” Jones said. “I’ve been thinking about the role white women have always and continue to play in upholding white supremacy.” The point is not to suggest that women are intentionally signaling white spaces but that “this agenda is at work, even if we are unaware or don’t want to acknowledge it.”

Echoing protestors’ righteous toppling of monuments that gained momentum last summer, Orders of Empire wrenches columns from their cozy camouflage. Literally upended, they are exposed as gimcrack–hollow props, not regal pedestals. In convening them, Jones creates what I’d called a counter-monument, a marker that simultaneously makes visible and deconstructs collective ideas of heritage. Over the exhibition’s course, the pile has grown, becoming more unwieldy as well as absurd in its utter futility.

Jones also visited predominantly white suburbs to create her photographs on view, driving to places such as River Forest, Riverside, Downers Grove, Elmhurst, and Wheaton. Over the past year, she’s trespassed into private yards to photograph public-facing markers that are, again, curiously low-grade. The cheap busts of white men and faux Greco-Roman urns are more reminders that whiteness dominates. Jones uses Adobe Photoshop’s spot healing brush to render the documented markers unrecognizable, then prints and cuts the photos to the scale of the object’s silhouette. At night, she returns to the site, conceals the marker with the photo, and photographs it by moonlight. The resulting prints, richly tonal and mysterious, are small subversions. They capture a momentary redaction of power–filtered through time and commercialization–by attentive, almost healing gestures. Some are noticeably edited, like an image that shows the clear outline of a bust or another, the contours of an amphora. But the most effective of Jones’s interventions are those that nearly blend with their surroundings, like happy glitches in the landscape.

Jones is aware that being a white woman has allowed her to do this work–so far, no one has called the police on her. Her race is one of the reasons I’d argue that she should be doing this work: white artists don’t feel the expectations that many artists of color do to make work about race, and infrequently examine whiteness without speaking for nonwhite communities.

And Jones’s work is ceaseless and ongoing. She is amassing a collection of vintage and tourist postcards depicting sites with historical monuments, more than 700 of which were displayed in Wish you were here, an installation she mounted earlier this year at the Lubeznik Center for the Arts in northwest Indiana. She digitally alters the postcards to remove controversial markers, reclaiming the tools of the very process used to mythologize them. Jones is also accumulating snapshots of white women posing with contested monuments, and the growing binder already points to an enduring process of patriotic identity building–one intrinsically tied to the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s funding of hundreds of Confederate statues.

In building and wrestling with these various material archives, Jones seems to be heeding artist Xaviera Simmons’s call for white artists: “Go further and work more rigorously to undo yourselves . . . do the cultural autopsy, name what whiteness is and the centuries of harm it has done . . . ” Jones names, interrogates, and implicates whiteness, better equipping us to work at dismantling it in our personal spaces. v

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