“Over the course of those four years as part of ART 180, and in partnership with Legal Aid Justice Center and later RISE for Youth, Performing Statistics helped advocates close a youth prison, change laws and policies on school suspensions and expulsions, and advance Virginia’s investment in community-based alternatives to incarceration. The project has been seen by tens of thousands of Virginians, been introduced to 20,000 classrooms through the Amplifier Foundation, and has trained more than 150 officers and recruits in the Richmond Police Department. This profound impact has happened in a short amount of time, and now it’s time for the project to extend beyond Richmond and beyond Virginia.” - Performing Statistics Website
The Jerome Project (My Loss) by Titus Kaphar
“Titus Kaphar’s The Jerome Project (My Loss) belongs to a larger series of the same title that the artist began in 2011. Searching online databases for his father’s prison records, he found dozens of individuals listed who shared his father’s first name, Jerome, as well as his last name. Struck by this discovery, he created portraits of each Jerome, based on their mug shots. The paired panels on view here show Kaphar’s own father. The panels draw on the visual tradition of Byzantine icons, specifically depictions of Saint Jerome, patron saint of librarians, scholars, and translators.
The panels were painted on flat gold-leaf backgrounds and then partially submerged in tar. Initially, the level of the tar reflected the percentage of each lifetime spent in prison. But Kaphar abandoned that formula in acknowledgment of incarceration’s lingering aftereffects, such as difficulty securing employment and loss of voting rights.” -Brooklyn Museum
9102000 by Cameron Rowland
“Walking through Cameron Rowland’s solo exhibition, 91020000, is a sobering experience. Here, the Philadelphia-born artist, who has been exhibiting in galleries for only a few years now, presents a body of work that is as disquieting as it is inspiring. The artist, known for displaying ready-made objects that are obtained through abstruse economic exchanges, showcases work that transcends its own objecthood as commodity, revealing a language (and history) of social and racial hierarchies.
This is the case in 91020000, its title derived from Artists Space’s customer account number with Corcraft, a company that manufactures affordable commodities to sell to government agencies, schools, and non-profit organizations (i.e. Artists Space). Mr. Rowland, through his partnership with Artists Space, purchased four courtroom benches made of oak, a particleboard office desk, and seven cast aluminum manhole rings. All are carefully strewn about the SoHo loft space, leaving the viewer to observe in silence these everyday, recondite objects. It is not until one picks up the accompanying leaflet, which includes a short essay by the artist along with captions for each piece in the exhibition, that we learn the aforementioned objects were made by the cheap labor of New York State’s prison inmates.” By Terence Trouillot for Brooklyn Rail
Photo Request from Solitary →
Photo Requests from Solitary (PRFS) is a participatory project that invites men and women held in long-term solitary confinement in U.S. prisons to request a photograph of anything at all, real or imagined, and then finds a volunteer to make the image. The astonishing range of requests, taken together, provide an archive of the hopes, memories, and interests of people who live in extreme isolation.