This study guide explores the themes of care and collectivism in Seeing through Stone.
Frank Alejandrez
Walking with Love, 2023-2024
In Walking with Love, intricately hand-carved wood walking sticks decorated with bears, hummingbirds, and snakes materialize the lessons Alejandrez learned in the decades he spent in the ‘secure housing unit’ at Pelican Bay State Prison. Since that time of enforced isolation, the importance of community and mutual aid has become paramount in the artist’s practice. As Alejandrez explains, “I want to destigmatize our shared–and human–need for help and support. The walking sticks, which I often make as gifts for elders in the community, are symbolic of the fact that no one needs to walk alone. We all can walk together and support each other along the way.” Walking with Love reflects Alejandrez’s commitment to the practices of nonviolence and compassion that the artist sees as foundational to creating a world free of prisons.
Robert Hillary King
Freelines, 1962 – Ongoing
Robert Hillary King’s Freelines bring into the galleries the praline candies which he began making during the 32 years he spent in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, 29 years of which were spent in solitary confinement. The pralines brought some sweetness and what King calls “the taste of freedom” into the prison as he shared the candies widely with others. As he explains:
“When you’re in prison, you have to come up with ideas to do the thing that your space and your environment restrict you from doing– that you are not allowed to do…You’re in a hopeless situation, but in a hopeless situation you still can envision hope.”
Sofia Karim’s Diptychs bring together the mundane and the profound, pairing parts of architectural drawings made by the artist with fragments of poems and letters sent to her by the former political prisoner G.N. Saibaba. Together the pairings capture the creative ways that people build connection and hope across prison walls. What makes these works particularly haunting is that the originals of Karim’s drawings are sensory gifts, made with colored pencils and oil pastels on textured, scented paper, but these originals were intended only for the audience within the prison. The versions shown in the gallery are a digital “ghost twin,” drained of color, touch, and smell.
A Collective Vision of Freedom
For Seeing Through Stone, artists inside and outside of prisons contributed images of how they imagined a sky without prisons in response to the following prompt: “In a world without prisons–and where all people are free–everyone would be able to see the sky.” Seeing the sky can seem a basic human right. Yet many incarcerated people are denied the ability of an unencumbered view of the sky for years if not decades. Works made in response are varied meditations on freedom.
Artist Aimee Gana engages the blue of the uniform that she wears daily, musing on what it might mean to wear the sky– and to embody freedom. Nathaniel McCray paints a young man leaping in a wide expanse of blue/gray– “My Son,” as he titles it. In George Red’s work, a reversal is performed; a hand reaches out from a hole made in a prison wall. The hole reveals a deep blue, suggesting that the wall might contain the sky. These and other works form a collective sky– and a vision for the shared work required to imagine, and create, a world without prisons.
You can scroll through all the individual pieces on display at Barrios Unidos and IAS in the portfollio pdf below.
IAS-BU-Skies-Portfolio-no-addresses-1-compressed
At each of the exhibition sites, the public is invited to participate in the project of collectively imagining freedom, by responding to the incarcerated artists featured in these “walls of skies” either through letters or drawings.
