In 2013, a group of ten women incarcerated at York Correctional Institution in Connecticut, calling themselves “Women of York,” created this work of art inspired by Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. The installation includes six entry banners and ten place settings arranged on a triangular table, each dedicated to a woman of personal significance to the artist.
The Real Cost of Prisons Project brings together justice activists, artists, researchers and people directly experiencing the impact of mass criminalization to work to end mass incarceration.
Have you ever wanted to see current or potential innovations for poverty or the environment without having to do a lot of researching or reading? Have you ever thought of an idea and wanted to tell the world about it and get feedback? Howitcouldbedifferent.org was founded for these purposes - to enable people to easily see, share, and suggest ideas in different categories.
"WILD: Act I" is a film demonstrating the power of creativity in constraint. Using moving choreography performed by Elijah Lancaster and vivid imagery displayed on three walls in a mock cell, Jeremy McQueen gives voice to young Black and Brown men caught in the criminal 'justice' system.
Alokananda Roy walked into Calcutta's Presidency Jail on International Women's Day, 2007. The Indian classical dancer had been invited to watch female inmates perform, but it was the men who caught her eye.
"They shook me," she says. "Their body language — it was as though they had no future, nothing to look forward to."
Máximas de Seguridad, a survival manual written and illustrated by Jhafis Quintero creates a new voice for the voiceless, vulnerable and underprivileged groups in prisons and creates empathy for those that are labeled as dangerous by society. The manual aims to provide empathy and humanity in light of the public scrutiny that ex-prisoners endure in the transition to social reintegration.
Thousand Kites, a nonprofit organization based in the Appalachian region, advocates for prison reform through performance.The following excerpt is directly quoted from the Thousand Kites website: "Starting 1998, as host of the rural, Appalachian region's only hip-hop
radio program "Lights Out," Thousand Kites media artist Nick Szuberla
received hundreds of letters from inmates recently transferred from distant
With American Prison Perspectives, Gielen intends tol illustrate how prison complex designs reflect the politics, economic priorities and anxieties of society, yet there would be so much more to say with pictures inside the prisions.
When the last detention facility in Guantanamo Bay was officially decommissioned in 2010, an international team of artists, curators and architects began planning and designing a museum that would take the place of the detention facility - a little less than two years later, their work became reality.