WOODLAWN — After spending the last several years documenting the lives of Black people killed by police, organizers of the Say Their Names mapping project will preview the effort’s forays into original art and research this week.

The Say Their Names community salon takes place 6 p.m. Friday at the Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. in Woodlawn. The salon will feature a demonstration of the project’s updated map and database, presentations by youth researchers and creative responses to the project commissioned from local artists.

The project, led by West Side experimental arts nonprofit NON:op Arts and Humanities, revolves around an interactive, crowd-sourced map honoring the lives of nearly 1,000 Black people killed by U.S. law enforcement.

Say Their Names centers the victims’ lives rather than their violent deaths, sharing “who they were, what they enjoyed [and] how their family members remember them,” co-founder Saba Ayman-Nolley said.

“Its purpose is to bring healing and remembering; of course, also educating those who don’t know much about this issue; and maybe, eventually, bringing some change,” Ayman-Nolley said.

Tickets to Friday’s salon are pay-what-you-can, with a suggested donation of $30. To register for the event, click here. For accessibility requests, email non@nonopera.org.

The Say Their Names project traces its roots to an earlier NON:op installation, “Blood Lines,” in which performers read the names of the 38 people killed in Chicago’s “Red Summer” race riots of 1919.

Ayman-Nolley was one of the readers as the piece was performed at Augustana Lutheran Church in Hyde Park, where the victims’ names coincided with a sound. The sound’s pitch varied to reflect the distance of each death from the riot’s epicenter — the lakefront killing of teenager Eugene Williams — “[mapping] the event into the space with sound and time,” NON:op founder Christophe Preissing said.

Ayman-Nolley realized in 2020, amid the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, that “Blood Lines” could be updated to modern racial violence, she said.

She turned to her longtime friend and colleague Ronald Browne — who was already researching the topic — and her coworkers at Northeastern Illinois University to help map out and humanize the “disturbing, dehumanizing” trend of police killings, she said.

“The [Say Their Names] project was really grounded by [Browne],” Ayman-Nolley said. “Unfortunately, a year ago, he was diagnosed with cancer, and last fall we lost him. That has been a very challenging thing in my case. I lost a very close friend; he was like a brother to me. It was also a great loss to the project — we’re still recovering.”

The map launched last year, pulling from online resources like the Washington Post’s police shooting database, the Tribune, the Sun-Times and Wikipedia, according to the Hyde Park Herald. Viewers can also submit edit requests and new stories through the project’s website.

Friday’s salon will show how Browne’s work to document Black lives continues.

“Really, the whole [event] is to honor him,” Ayman-Nolley said.

With hundreds of names, lives and personal stories documented on the Say Their Names map, organizers have started growing the project into a multimedia reflection on Black lives and police brutality.

Two youth researchers will present the cases on which they’ve spent months writing biographies, finding photographs and updating project databases during Friday’s salon.

The research “educates them about this issue in our country … and also [offers] a healing element for them,” she said. “For young people, watching this happen in their communities and in their world is very difficult.”

The researchers have been paid through their work via a Healing Illinois grant, which also supports the salon, Ayman-Nolley said. The grant ends in June, and organizers are looking for funding to extend this “pilot” research program, she said.

Four local artists have also been commissioned by Say Their Names to create original pieces which respond to the stories told through the project.

Poet Donna “Dante” Marie Gary; visual artist Pugs Atomz, co-founder of the Englewood Arts Collective; and the duo of poet Tara Betts with composer Anthony Green will preview their pieces at Friday’s salon.

Their completed works will be performed at a fall concert, alongside other pieces created for the project, Preissing said.

This first round of commissioned art is “intended to lead to what I envision as a national day in which we say the names of all of these people,” Preissing said.

It’s part of a long-term goal of bringing readings — similar to “Blood Lines” — to communities across the nation, where people can honor and reflect on their neighbors lost to police violence, he said.

“An awakening should happen, education and learning should happen across communities and societies, in order for any change to really happen,” Preissing said.

Say Their Names “documents incidents that likely would not have resulted in the death of white Americans given the same set of circumstances,” according to the project’s methodology.

Breonna Taylor — killed as Louisville police forcibly entered her home without identifying themselves, and shot 32 times after her boyfriend fired once — is “one of the best examples,” Ayman-Nolley said.

“Our focus for the project is on those who are clearly innocent victims of police brutality,” with criteria prioritizing cases where the victim did not have a weapon drawn or was not being pursued by police, the methodology reads.

Say Their Names reflects “the most obvious” cases of police brutality, Ayman-Nolley said when asked how and why the concept of innocence plays a role in whose stories are told.

“We’re not trying to ignore the complexity,” Ayman-Nolley said. “People that shouldn’t have been shot and are dead should be remembered and humanized, and their families and communities should be healed.”

Harith Augustus — a well-respected barber killed by Chicago Police Officer Dillan Halley in 2018 as he carried a holstered gun — is among those memorialized on the Say Their Names map.

Organizers have not yet rejected a submission of a Black person killed by police over questions of the victim’s “innocence,” Ayman-Nolley said.

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