Laurie Jo Reynolds is an American artist most known for her work in

policy Policy is a deliberate system of guidelines to guide decisions and achieve rational outcomes. A policy is a statement of intent and is implemented as a procedure or protocol. Policies are generally adopted by a governance body within an organ ...

and

social practice Social practice is a theory within psychology that seeks to determine the link between practice and context within social situations. Emphasized as a commitment to change, social practice occurs in two forms: activity and inquiry. Most often a ...

. She is a current Assistant Professor of

Social Justice Social justice is justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society. In Western and Asian cultures, the concept of social justice has often referred to the process of ensuring that individuals fu ...

at the School of Art and Art History at the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...

at Chicago. She was awarded a Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art in 2014, a Creative Capital award for Emerging Fields in 2013, and a

Creative Time Creative Time is a New York-based nonprofit arts organization. It was founded in 1974 to support the creation of innovative, site-specific, socially engaged artworks in the public realm, particularly in vacant spaces of historical and architectura ...

Annenberg Prize in 2013. Working in what she calls "legislative art," her work primarily manifests outside the gallery or museum, though she has been included in exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum, and the Van Abbemuseum.

Tamms Year Ten

In 2008, Reynolds organized the Tamms Year Ten project, in collaboration with the art historian Stephen Eisenman, attorney Jean Snyder, and poet Nadya Pittendrigh. The project sought to and led to the closure of the Tamms C-Maxx prison in 2013. In 1998, the Tamms C-Maxx

prison A prison, also known as a jail, gaol (dated, standard English, Australian, and historically in Canada), penitentiary (American English and Canadian English), detention center (or detention centre outside the US), correction center, correc ...

was opened in southern Illinois as a maximum security prison designed for prisoners to be kept in

solitary confinement Solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment in which the inmate lives in a single cell with little or no meaningful contact with other people. A prison may enforce stricter measures to control contraband on a solitary prisoner and use additi ...

. The Tamms Poetry Committee was formed by a group of artists with the intention of providing social comfort to the prisoners in the form of a poetry exchange. Communications between the artist group and the prisoners uncovered a variety of awareness around inhumane conditions that the prisoners were being kept in. Reynolds, an artist who emerged as leader of the Tamms Poetry Committee, coined the term "legislative art" in order to raise awareness around the extreme solitary conditions that the prisoners were being kept in. The Tamms Year Ten project was created in 2008 to organize a formal policy campaign that eventually led to the closure of Tamms C-Maxx prison in 2013.

Awards

Open Society Foundation Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, is a grantmaking network founded and chaired by business magnate George Soros. Open Society Foundations financially supports civil society groups around the world, with a sta ...

Soros Justice Fellowship (2010) * Creative Capital award for Emerging Fields (2013) *

Annenberg Prize (2013) * Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art (2014) * Opportunity Agenda Fellowship (2015)

References

External links

Profile at the University of Illinois at Chicago
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reynolds, Laurie Jo Living people University of Illinois faculty 21st-century American women artists Year of birth missing (living people) American women academics