Closure Is Not Justice

Good morning,

I’ll have some new writing to share next week, but today I wanted to share an update on a project I told you about back in March. Closure Is Not Justice is a multimedia public art project drawing attention to the 1988 explosion that killed six Kansas City firefighters, and the public campaign to generate false testimony among residents in the Marlborough neighborhood, turning neighbor against neighbor, all for the sake of closure.

Beginning this week, we are posting signs and billboards in Kansas City that we’ve begun to refer to as “counter-propaganda.” In the mid-90s such tools were used by the ATG agents investigating the crime in order to generate false tips against five innocent people. I’m interested in how public signs become tools of injustice by calling the public to participate in false accusations and wrongful convictions.

The billboards and signs will be posted throughout the summer, and the project will culminate in a multimedia exhibition at the Vulpes Bastille gallery in the Crossroads. The exhibition will explore this story from several different angles including video, audio, oral history, and immersive nostalgia. I’m also excited to tell you that the exhibition will include a series of erasure poems by my friend and award-winning poet Courtney Faye Taylor. If you’re in Kansas City, please mark your calendars for the opening on Friday, September 1st.

If you have memories of the night of the explosion, please share!

---

What I’m currently reading: Steven Millhauser’s Enchanted Night, Jenny Offil’s Weather, Clare Dederer’s Monsters

What I’m currently listening to: All 90s, all of the time.