The art class of teacher Laura Mulkoff at Uplift Community High School in Chicago created linoleum relief prints depicting children who have been murdered in Chicago. 

…the city should focus on harnessing the arts to solve its most pressing problem, which is the violence on its streets. The plan needs to improve access to the institutions that already have infrastructure and a plan to do the work on this problem. We just need to get more at-risk kids in to see the work. Simultaneously, a big investment should be made in getting the arts into the city’s schools and troubled spots, not because the work is necessarily anything that general audiences will want to see, but because creating art is a proven way to raise self-esteem, build community, understand yourself and get moving in life. Everything else can wait.

Chicago Tribune theatre critic Chris Jones critiques the Chicago Cultural Plan’s draft, whittling down its long list of proposals to a few essential projects. 

Check out some of the work The Interrupters’  Eddie Bocanegra’s been doing towards preventing violence through art at the National Museum of Mexican Art and with Enlace Chicago