Artists in Seeing through Stone look critically at both the physical and ideological structures that sustain and produce modern forms of incarceration.
Race, Space, and Justice
In her article Carceral Architectures, architect and scholar Mabel O. Wilson examines the historical and ongoing relationship between prison design and histories of racialized and gendered oppression in the United States. One example she highlights is Thomas Jefferson’s sketches for a prison in Piedmont, VA. In Jefferson’s design, the cells are organized by race, gender, and crime. Wilson notes that Jefferson does not include “debtor” or “criminal” in categorizing imprisoned Black people and suggests that this is because the cells were designed to hold people who had escaped the captivity of slavery. In other words, the racist ideology of the slave-owning economy in which Jefferson played a powerful role is reflected in the very structure of the prison he designed.
In 2024, Angela Davis received the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for Contribution to Architecture. Though Davis is not an architect, the award recognized her work that “demonstrates how space and the built environment are integral to combating all forms of oppression, and how all struggles for justice are also spatial struggles.”
Spaces that Hold
Many of the artists in Seeing through Stone work explicitly with the architecture of prisons, jails, and other spaces of captivity to explore the ideas and experiences embedded within the structures and as material for building something new.
In Memories of Keraniganj Jail, 2019, architect and activist Sofia Karim depicts the stories told by her uncle (photographer and activist Shahidul Alam) about his time in Keraniganj Jail, Bangladesh. In the video below, Karim describes how she used architectural drawings to try to understand the emotional and physical pain of her uncle’s incarceration.
Sherrill Roland’s sculptures Forecast (Orange) and Forecast (Blue) depict an opaque window set into a frame of bricks, all outlined in neon. These works extend Roland’s project of exploring the materials available to him while wrongfully incarcerated, using the visual vocabulary of prison architecture to speak poetically to the tensions between longing, frustration, and hope that constituted his experience.
The gesture of looking up at the window is a hopeful thing; it is the dreamer’s point of view. The window was a constant reminder of a possibility.
Sherrill roland
But, I never could see out.
Maria Gaspar transforms the debris of Cook County Jail
Chicago-based artist Maria Gaspar has several works in Seeing through Stone which focus on Cook County Jail, the largest single-site jail in the United States. The 96-acre facility bisects the primarily Latinx neighborhood in which it is located, and where the artist is from. The jail serves as a backdrop to life in the area—Gaspar rode past it daily as a child on her bus rides to school—and Gaspar has explored ways to bridge the debris salvaged from the demolition of a wing of the Cook County Department of Corrections becomes the material with which to build a liberated world.
Maria Gaspar
Cloud Outs, 2023
Archival pigment prints with oil pastel on Hahnemuhle paper
Cloud Outs are a series of five large-scale paintings where the artist extends the sky of each image using oil pastels. The carceral facility of Cook County Jail is, therefore, transformed into an ethereal landscape. Over the last decade, Maria has taught in Cook County Jail and worked with community groups extensively. These workshops have often led to discussions about what people would like to see replace the jail. As she learned, most people want a park on the 96 acres of land that the jail occupies—a place where they can sit under the sky with their family and friends, a place where children can play and fly kites. In these paintings, Maria brings that dream into sight.
Maria Gaspar
Invisible Things Are Not Necessarily Not-There (after T.M.), 2023
23 individual cast glass sculptures
This set of sculptures transfigures the once impenetrable iron bars and bricks from the Cook County Jail into fragile, transparent pieces of glass. This work dematerializes the jail and destabilizes it as materials that seem immovable or permanent, become windows. The title references Tony Morrison’s influential text “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.”
Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature by Toni Morrison
Maria Gaspar
We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (after Angela Davis), 2023-On going
We Lit the Fire invites audiences to witness how iron bars salvaged from the demolition of the Division 1 Building of the Cook County Department of Corrections in Chicago, IL can be transformed through acts of touch and vibration. Musicians and performers work with the artist and the artifacts to transfigure materials of confinement into new experiences of liberation. Important for this ongoing work is that the bars are never restricted, as with an instrument that has a specific sound and a specific manner of being played; instead, new collaborations and improvisations suggest new formal and physical configurations, armatures of support, care, and release, in contrast to those of submission, restraint, and restriction. On October 7th, 2023 James Gordon Williams performed “The Principle of Alloys” on the bars.
“If I know any thing at all,
Assatur Shakur, Affirmation
it’s that a wall is just a wall
and nothing more at all.
It can be broken down.”
The above lines from Affirmation by Assatur Shakur are a reminder that prisons, border walls, and other carceral structures are not permanent and impenetrable, as they can often seem, but physical structures that were built by people and can be dismantled by people. And, just as the physical walls can be taken down, so can the ideologies and policies that they represent.
In the clip below, Huong Ngo extends that thinking to nations and the creation of “refugee” as a man-made category in discussing the title for her work And The State of Emergency Is Also Always a State of Emergence, 2017.
Bridging Institutions, Building collective power
Caleb Duarte created a 13-foot model of a prison surveillance tower at each of the three venues for ‘Seeing through Stone’ (the Institute of the Art and Sciences, San José Museum of Art, and Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos) for a work called Tres Terrenos (‘Three Terrains’). The form of the tower references a mobile reconstruction of a solitary cell that is housed at Barrios Unidos and used for educating people about the harms of solitary confinement. At each location Duarte has created a slightly different iteration. At both SJMA and the IAS the towers are encased in concreteAt Barrios Unidos the tower is built from soil, referencing adobe home-making techniques and pointing to the space’s ethos of welcoming and supporting system impacted individuals. The guard towers in two versions stand erect, while in one, the tower lays almost horizontal.
The toppling of the tower is a very accessible metaphor for the toppling of institutional structures that are violent to our communities. And at the same time, it’s a form that transforms these systems of power and [shows] how communities grab public space to demand visibility.
Caleb Duarte
The fallen tower at the IAS evokes Angela Davis’ comment that “walls turned sideways are bridges.” In this case, the tower is a bridge over prison walls and a bridge between institutions.
Over the months that the work is on view, the towers are transformed by members of the Barrios Unidos community through paintings that visually quote the Barrios Unidos space, reference the organization’s importance as a space of community building and political action, and draw upon histories of Chicano visual culture. This form of collaborative art-making, as well as performances by Duarte and his collaborators over the course of the exhibition, emphasize the importance of collective action and art as a tool of community building, in contrast to the traditional modernist emphasis on individual creativity that is often foregrounded in museum spaces.
“The tower is like the body and we are tattooing, marking the cement skin of institutional structures with our own stories.”
CaleB Duarte
What if the prison buildings could choose?
For Color the Skies Fallen Prisons, the artist collective Timesfive worked with chemist Elliot Williams to explore the question: does the iron in prison bars consent to its use in a system of violence?
Iron, the most abundant element on earth, has the power to change; it can become steel, bronze, titanium, or even a shade of blue. Prussian blue, the first modern synthetic pigment, was created in 1704, when a chemist accidentally mixed animal blood, potash, and iron sulfate and formed the distinct hue. It has since adorned paintings and been used to create blueprints, as well as for its powerful medicinal properties. Color the Skies Fallen Prisons imagines the potential for prison bars to become pigment. A fenestration in the gallery wall is both a peephole and a portal through which to view the night sky above Santa Cruz on the day the last prison falls, painted in Prussian blue.
Alongside the peephole, the artists provide a synthetic process to convert prison steel into the vibrant Prussian Blue dye (Fe7[CN]18). The artists present this assisted route as an alternative to the hundreds of years required to corrode a single steel prison bar without intervention. In the video below, the collaborators discuss the consent of architecture, the process for their calculations and the way the peephole engages the gallery architecture.
Bodies as Architectures of Liberation
The last piece in this study guide imagines bodies balancing and supporting each other as a form of architecture that counters the divisions and confinements of prisons. In Succession is grounded in separate reports published in early twentieth-century newspapers presenting Black acrobats as figures of transgression. In 1900, the New York Times reported that six Black men formed a human pyramid, cut a hole in the ceiling, and escaped from Middlesex County Jail. Other reports include a story of Black men forming a human pyramid to save a white woman from a burning building, and an acrobatic burglar who broke into wealthy homes and claimed to redistribute spoils to the poor. Jemison’s film turns these escapes and rescues on their side, foregrounding contact and mutual support in new ways.
In an online presentation with Creative Capital, Jemison shares several questions about bodies, mutual support, and liberation that inform her practice.
How do we stand on and be stood upon at the same time?
Stefani Jemison
How do we decide when to risk it all together?
How are the concepts of risk and possibility inextricably linked?
How do we learn on the fly? How do we fly?
If we are all we’ve got, how do we use ourselves to find the forms of the future?
How do we find freedom with, rather than freedom from, each other?
