NPEP x VI 2024 Exhibit

The Northwestern Pritzker School of Law Visibility Initiative (VI) is a student-led organization that aims to promote diversity and mental health through shared encounters with art and aesthetics. Comprising students, staff, faculty, and alumni, VI creates exhibits, workshops, and spaces for community across the NLaw campus.

The artworks of this exhibition were created by NPEP students in response to the following prompt:

“What do you want to be known about yourself, past, present, or future?”

Across several workshops, students discussed art’s power to communicate and heal. They utilized form, theme, and context to create meaning in their work. In critique circles, they worked with one another to strengthen their narratives, making changes in composition, color, and tone.

Art is an important tool for “epistemic reparations,” a term coined by Jennifer Lackey, Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, to describe the right to be known—to experience the transformative potential of telling one’s story and being heard.

As you view the exhibit in the following pages, allow yourself to encounter each student through their artwork. Bear witness to their stories. Hear and see what they want to be known.

With special thanks to the Northwestern Prison Education Program Epistemic Reparations Fund, the Bluhm Legal Clinic, the Northwestern School of Law Facilities Department, and Joss Broward.