CARLOS JAVIER ORTIZ

DISARM
Opening exhibitions, Friday, June 23

Weinberg/Newton Gallery. 688 N Milwaukee Ave, First Floor Chicago, IL 60642

Firebird Community Arts, Lookingglass Theatre Company, Jennifer Nagle Myers, Carlos Javier Ortiz, Jefferson Pinder

DISARM Everyday Violence, Every Day is presented in partnership with Firebird Community Arts and Gun Violence Prevention PAC (G-PAC)

Dear Community, 

I welcome you to create your own version of my artwork A City Without Guns. Your collective version will be displayed in the gallery, growing as it evolves throughout the course of the exhibition. It will be in conversation and community with the one I am sharing.

The instructions are simple: Go out into the world and search the ground for fallen tree branches in the shape of guns. Once you start looking, you will start seeing them. Collect them, one at a time, each time with the intention as you hold it in your hands that we can enter a new paradigm as a culture and live in a city without guns. That our public health crisis of gun violence becomes something we look back at and reflect upon, and that the guns in our cities have returned to being sticks, fallen from our good and trusty friends, the trees – of whom we need many, many more around us.

Do this in the spirit of imagination and trust that even in this type of gesture, something is accomplished. Bring your collection to the gallery and someone there will mount them to the wall to create the community version over the run of the show.

Thank you, and in solidarity,

— Jennifer Nagle Myers