The Artists Taking on Mass Incarceration (Published 2022) (2024)

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Aug. 11, 2022

WHEN THE INTERDISCIPLINARY artist Maria Gaspar was 12 years old, her teachers took her to jail. It was the early 1990s, in the era of Scared Straight programs aimed at curbing juvenile delinquency, and Gaspar and her classmates were deemed “at risk,” by virtue of where they lived — the West Side of Chicago — and who they were, many of them first-generation immigrants from Mexico. Back then, on any given day, Cook County Jail, located in the city’s South Lawndale neighborhood, housed some 8,000 people, a third of them pretrial detainees unable to post bail, mostly men, Black and brown. Gaspar remembers her frightened teachers, all of them white, scurrying through tiered cellblocks; the inedible food served to them in the mess hall; the guards scolding the young visitors for crossing their legs and for “not being ‘clean.’” But her clearest memory is of the faces of those who gazed back at her from their confinement. “I remember feeling like the guys behind bars looked like people down my block,” she says. “They just looked like people I knew. That stuck with me.”

Thirty years later, Cook County is demolishing the nearly century-old Division 1 section of the jail, the very cellblocks Gaspar visited as a child. She has been documenting that process for the better part of a year. Shooting video footage, salvaging bars and bricks, Gaspar, 42, has been gathering raw materials that she and a group of jailed artists, collaborators who comprise what she terms an ensemble, will use in conceiving an experimental performance piece that reflects on absence and presence. “Sometimes it feels very abstract, a little bit vague,” she admits, though she understands this indeterminacy as a necessary feature of any collective artistic labor — and as a reflection of her collaborators’ precarious condition. “This is a place for us to play and to experiment,” she says. “It may not fit the different categories that we have already determined, but that’s OK. We can make new ones.” The acts of creating art and serving time share this much: They both demand that one find freedom in constraint.

The Artists Taking on Mass Incarceration (Published 2022) (2)

The art of mass incarceration, both the art that incarcerated people produce and the art that incarcerated people and the system itself inspire, has never been more visible than it is today. Galvanized by the events of 2020 — the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and the protests that followed — the art world is increasingly centering works that engage with and critique America’s carceral state. In late 2021, for instance, the conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas debuted an exhibition titled “Another Justice: Divided We Stand” at the Kayne Griffin gallery in Los Angeles, featuring mixed-media works composed of prison uniforms and American flags, making literal the tensions between American freedom and captivity in a patchwork of labyrinthine pathways and star-filled skies. This year’s Venice Biennale features the conceptual artist Sable Elyse Smith’s “Landscape” series, a sequence of large-scale neon textual installations that blur the lines between the institutional and the intimate. “Like the hands of the correctional officer on my abdomen searching for metal — rather — groping for the sake of taking over — for possession,” one begins.

The art world’s turn toward incarceration hasn’t happened overnight. In 2018, the curator Risa Puleo, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, debuted the landmark exhibition “Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System” at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The show helped coalesce a community of nonincarcerated contemporary artists who, through a diversity of media and practices, were each seeking ways for their art to take more than symbolic action when it comes to social justice, prison reform and abolition. Building on this momentum, in September 2020, the scholar Nicole R. Fleetwood, 49, curated “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration” at MoMA PS1 in Queens, which underscored the continuities between work that’s done inside and done outside the prison walls, and in the spaces in between. Propelling all of these efforts are writers and activists, from the social justice advocates Bryan Stevenson and Angela Davis to the scholars Michelle Alexander and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, all of whom recognize the importance of art as a tool for structural change.

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