Wes Janz

About Wes Janz

I was raised on a farm (central Wisconsin), worked as a union member (United Paperworkers International), earned a PhD (Michigan, ’95), received NEA, Graham, and Ruth Mott foundation grants (among others), was a winner of the inaugural Curry Stone Design Prize (intended to “highlight, honor, and reward projects that improve daily living conditions for communities around the world”), lectured on six continents, and have professor emeritus of architecture rank (Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana). In 2012, I began offering classes that questioned U.S-based approaches to mass incarceration. I visited prisons, joined in-prison counseling weekends in Massachusetts and Wisconsin, observed 500+ youth court hearings, started letter exchanges with three men who are incarcerated, installed gallery shows in Indiana, Kentucky, and Wisconsin; and participated in anti-death penalty vigils at United States Penitentiary Terre Haute. Recent publications related to mass incarceration include: “Stand, Sit, Fall: Three Movements in Space and Time” in Present Elsewhere, Rashid Rana, ed, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, 2017; “Devil’s Rope” in Future Rural Archive, Jap Sam Books, the Netherlands, 2018; and “Why Sit In Court?” in The Courtroom Artist Residency Report, Public Collectors, Chicago, 2018. In 2022, the academic journal Space and Culture published the critical obituaries of Lezmond Mitchell and Orlando Hall.

Experience

1. Writer

   A Murder Of Crows

   Jul 2020 — Present · Indianapolis, IN, US

   Thirteen people were executed in the last months of the Trump administration in the only death row and execution chamber in the federal prison system as sited in Terre Haute, Indiana, eighty miles from my Indianapolis home. Their names are Danny Lee, Wes Purkey, Dustin Honken, Lezmond Mitchell, Keith Nelson, Will LeCroy, Chris Vialva, Orlando Hall, Brandon Bernard, Alfred Bourgeois, Lisa Montgomery, Corey Johnson, and Dustin Higgs.In mid 2020, I set out to write traditional eulogies to give those executed a bit of decency in death denied them in life. In time, I put the thirteen at the center of the death penalty, death row, execution chamber, and state-sponsored killing protocols; shared critical moments from their crimes, trials, sentencings, confinements, appeals, and deaths; and provided a fuller awareness of the gauntlet of pain each survived in childhood and youth as the adults around them faded, fell, and failed. My completed manuscript is titled A Murder of Crows: Critical obituaries for the thirteen people executed in the last months of the Trump administration. One must have a deep commitment to justice for all persons when advocating for those who committed murder and inflicted intense pain and life-long suffering on others. Such a humanistic dedication is at the core of A Murder of Crows.

Education

• University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

  Masters

  1976 — 1978

• University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

  Bachelor of Science

  1971 — 1976

• University of Michigan

  PhD

  1991 — 1995

Skills

• Urban Planning
• Sketchup
• Architectures
• Sustainability
• Art
• Design Research
• Higher Education
• Sustainable Architecture
• Blogging
• Architecture
• Sustainable Design
• Creative Direction
• Teaching
• Architectural Design
• Historic Preservation
• Adobe Creative Suite
• Comprehensive Planning
• Urban Design
• Revit