Laine Justice

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Birmingham AL in 1981, Laine grew up in the Pacific Northwest, spending summers in the South garnering a lifelong appreciation of making from her grandmother, a quilter, dollmaker, and ceramicist. This love of creating grew into formal life study at the Portland Art Museum and imaginative drawing, practices cut short in her early teens.

Taken at 14 in the middle of the night to North Idaho, Laine spent her formative years in CEDU’s system of group homes and wilderness programs. CEDU, from the cult Synanon, practiced pseudopsychology, around-the-clock thought reform, and behavior modification on children. Restricting access to the world, education, and bodily autonomy, this inhumane environment reframed life into black & white morality and ritualistic behaviors in an incredibly isolated place. Learning to shift who one is and their understanding of the world as a means of survival, left many with out a stable individual identity. Exploring this sense of one’s shifting self in within a moving world continues to thread through all of her work. Despite harsh conditions inherent to the program and the Idaho wilderness, time in the natural world provided Laine an immediate respite and sense of wonder. Wild open spaces, how we feel in them, and our connection to the creatures that move through them, remains a lasting influence on her work.

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Laine left CEDU in the winter, a few months before her 18th birthday and immediately enrolled in university, thrilled with the opportunity to learn and pursue drawing. She began foundation and life study at Pacific Northwest College of Art, before moving to NY and to begin studies at Pratt Institute. Life study and landscape are still very much a part of her contemporary studio practice. Laine earned her BFA in painting from Pratt Institute in 2003, after spending 2 years studying sculpture and one semester in Lucca, Italy, on a Gilman travel and study grant learning about pigments and the sculptural qualities of paint.

A SF Bay Area Artadia Award Finalist, Community Foundation Sonoma Emerging Artist Awardee, and a recipient of a Chalk Hill Residency Scholarship, she has had her work exhibited at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, the Sonoma County Museum of Art, and more broadly throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Santa Fe, and Costa Rica. Her work has appeared in Luxe Magazine, House Beautiful, Sonoma Magazine, San Francisco Magazine, and The History Channel among other publications. Active within the #unsilenced and #breakincodesilence movements, her advocacy work has focused on raising awareness about institutional child abuse within congregate care. Working within disability — CPTSD, Lupus, and ME — shapes her studio practice. She works in Northern California with her husband and their pug, Bernie.

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The SICAA ACT & #BreakingCodeSilence Movement
An advocate for survivors of the “Troubled” Teen / Teen Treatment Industry (TTI) and Institutional Child Abuse, it’s my hope to see an end to the TTI and equal rights for children in congregate care. I put “Troubled” in quote marks because more often than not, the youth sent into the TTI are far from troubled. They are kids that are disabled and in need of extra care, foster kids with no placement,  children with depression  in need of extra support such as time in therapy and extra attention with their care givers, or LGBTQ2+ children sent away for conversion- and once in the TTI they find nothing but abuse.
Inspired by the courage of fellow survivors in the #BreakingCodeSilence and #ISeeYouSurvivor movements, I recently shared my testimonial [trigger warning: child abuse, mental health] with #IGotOut.org, speaking about my time at CEDU Rocky Mountain Academy, Ascent and the process of being transported from state to state by strangers. I lived in shame, silence and fear about what happened to me for many years. I believe it is important to speak out loud about what happens in these facilities so that desperate parents first try to seek community care, and if residential care is truly the last option, they know what to look for and what to avoid. Secondly, so that our representatives know that they need to do better for our children. There is so much that needs to be fixed.
Despite how hard it is to recount what happened in these facilities, thousands of survivors have bravely come forward to share their experiences in support of the The Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act (SICAA), to support the bill, click on this link. To read more testimonials, and to learn about the survivor led movement seeking the exposure of injustice and legislative reform, please visit Unsilenced.org.

#Unsilenced #ISeeYouSurvivor #UnitedWithOneVoice #KidsOverProfit #LetsTalkAboutIt #ThinkOfUs #IGotOut