IAS & Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos Galleries will be closed Dec. 21, 2024–Jan. 1, 2025.
In a wide-ranging conversation about filmmaking and abolition, brown and Sheppard will engage the critical questions the film raises about how to build trust, restore and repair lives devastated by the U.S. criminal legal system.
Registration to this event will also include limited access to an online screening of the award-winning Since I Been Down. WATCH HERE between October 21-28.
Visualizing Abolition is organized by Professor Gina Dent, Feminist Studies and Dr. Rachel Nelson, Director, Institute of the Arts and Sciences. The events feature artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition.
adrienne maree brown is the writer-in-residence at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, and author of Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements and How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. She is the cohost of the “How to Survive the End of the World”, “Octavia’s Parables” and “Emergent Strategy” podcasts.
Gilda Sheppard is an award-winning filmmaker who has screened her documentaries throughout the United States, and internationally in Ghana, at the Festival Afrique 360 Cannes, France, and at the International Black Film Festival in Berlin. Sheppard is a 2017 Hedgebrook Fellow for documentary film and a 2019 recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship. For over a decade Sheppard has been teaching sociology classes in Washington State women and men prisons. She is a sponsor for the Black Prisoner’s Caucus, and is among the founders and faculty for Freedom Education for Puget Sound (FEPPS) an organization offering college credit courses at Washington Correctional Center for Women. Sheppard is the author of several publication’s including Culturally Relevant Arts Education for Social Justice: A Way Out of No Way (2013). Sheppard is a Professor of Sociology, Cultural and Media studies at The Evergreen State College Tacoma Campus.
Since I Been Down focuses on one city in the USA, Tacoma, WA, as an example of “Everytown.” Influenced by the national drug war frenzy and the fear-based culture of punishment in the 1980s-90s, Tacoma sacrificed its most-vulnerable children to a life behind bars. Those children, now adults, cannot be silenced as they advocate for transformative and restorative justice from behind bars, seeking to prevent future generations of black and brown boys from the same fate.
