Deana Lawson (based in Brooklyn, NY) is a photo-based artist whose work borrows from the visual traditions of photographic and figurative portraiture, social documentary aesthetics, and vernacular family album photographs. Lawson is visually inspired by the materiality of Black culture and its expressions, as seen through the body and in domestic environments.
2012-2014
Mohawk Correctional Facility
Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Digital prints
2012-2014
Mohawk Correctional Facility
Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Digital prints
Deana Lawson’s Mohawk Correctional Facility: Jazmin & Family is an appropriated series of images taken by a prison photographer over a period of two years and depict the artist’s cousin Jazmin and her partner Erik. The multiple photographs show the couple and their growing family posed in front of a mural that depicts a deep blue ocean and tranquil sky. The painted backdrop was designed for portrait-taking in the visitation area of Mohawk Correctional Facility in New York.
The resulting images offer a profound glimpse into how love and family are negotiated and maintained within the prison system. As scholar Nicole Fleetwood notes, “Taken together, prison portraits become a powerful archive, representing the enduring struggles of Black Americans to claim citizenship, kinship, love, and even hope in the face of multiple forms of racial injustice—poverty, profiling, failed economic policies, and mass incarceration.”
Deana Lawson’s work is also featured in the following Barring Freedom study guide: From the Inside Out
Deana Lawson received a B.F.A. from Penn State in 2001 and am M.F.A. in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. Recent solo exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; MoMA PS1, NY; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Huis Marseilles, Amsterdam; The Underground Museum, Los Angeles, and the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. She is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship; Art Matters Grant; John Gutmann Photography Fellowship; Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant; Aaron Siskind Fellowship Grant, and a NYFA Grant in 2006. Lawson is a professor of photography at Princeton University.
