Join us for a special curator-led walk-through of Seeing through Stone with IAS Director and Chief Curator, Dr. Rachel Nelson. Dr. Nelson will reflect on this major Visualizing Abolition Program’s exhibition, which is the first of such scale to be displayed at a UCSC gallery.

Schedule:
5–7 p.m. First Friday Gallery Opening Hours
5:30 p.m. Exhibition Tour

Seeing through Stone brings together artwork by contemporary artists from around the globe whose work engages prisons, justice, and freedom. Drawing its title from poet Etheridge Knight’s evocation of those who have “the secret eyes,” Seeing through Stone highlights the works of artists, including those who are formerly and currently incarcerated, that offer a vision beyond carceral systems, drawing out the flourishing collective story and alternative imagining currently underway in creating a future free of prisons. The multi-sited exhibition is not focused on prisons but rather is oriented towards artists who help provide a vision—and a model—of abolition in practice. In sixteen newly commissioned projects, alongside other works of video, painting, sculpture, installation, sound, and performance, across three exhibition sites, Seeing through Stone provides a model of hope.

Seeing through Stone is co-organized by the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and San José Museum of Art.

The Institute of the Arts and Sciences is pleased to participate in Santa Cruz’s First Friday Art Tour.

Dr. Rachel Nelson is director and chief curator of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences. She has curated and organized exhibitions including Barring Freedom, a group exhibition engaging art, prisons, and justice; Carlos Motta: We The Enemy;  jackie sumell: Solitary Garden; Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer Harrison: Future Garden, and other projects with artists including Sadie Barnette, Maria Gaspar, Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas, and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Nelson also writes and publishes extensively on contemporary art and geopolitics, including exhibition catalogue essays, journal articles, and reviews in Journal of Curatorial Studies, Public History Weekly, Brooklyn Rail, NKA, Third Text, Savvy, and African Arts. She teaches in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at UC Santa Cruz.

Images: Installation views of Seeing through Stone at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, April 12, 2024-January 5, 2025. Photography by Glen Cheriton.