Join us for the next event in Sesnon Gallery Speak Up Series, featuring a discussion with Professor Sharon Daniel currently in Barring Freedom on view at the San José Museum of Art. Focus will particularly be paid to Daniel’s installation series Undoing Time and her new interactive documentary, Exposed, as the basis for a conversation on prison labor and the incongruity between the conditions of prisoners and the promise of constitutional freedom. This event is presented by the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery in collaboration with the UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences.

Sesnon Speak Up
Sharon Daniel and Undoing Time
December 9, 2020
5:30–6:30 p.m. PST
Register HERE

Sharon Daniel’s work has been exhibited in museums and festivals internationally including California College of the Arts; the Schmidt Center Gallery; Sheffield Doc|Fest,UK; STUK Kunstencentrum, Belgium; WRO Media Art Biennial, Poland; and Corcoran Biennial, Washington DC. Her essays have been published in books, including Female Authorship and the Documentary Image (Oxford University Press, 2018), Context Providers (Intellect Press 2011), and professional journals such ASAP Journal, Cinema Journal, among others. Daniel was honored by the Webby Awards in 2008 and the Rockefeller/Tribeca Film Festival New Media Fellowship in 2009. In 2015-16 she was named in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts “YBCA 100” and in 2017, she was a Fulbright Scholar at Ulster University in Art, Design and the Built Environment. Daniel is a Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Undoing Time/PLEDGE, is a video installation co-authored with Beverly Henry, who was formerly imprisoned at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, where she worked in a prison sweatshop sewing American flags for sixty-five cents an hour. An 8 x 10 US flag made in the factory where Beverly worked provided the material for the installation Undoing Time/Amends/Excessive Force. Daniel has embroidered the names of Black men and women murdered by police onto the stars in the flag embellished the stripes with texts from supreme court opinions about the practice of “stop and frisk”. 

EXPOSED, is an online artwork which documents the spread of COVID-19, over time, inside prisons, jails, and detention centers across the US, from the perspective of incarcerated people, their communities, and facility staff. Letters and phone calls from Tim Young (Solitary Garden project) provide a narrative thread throughout this work.

The Sesnon Gallery Speak Up Series aims to provide a safe space for students and the UCSC community to engage with ideas generated from the exhibition Barring Freedom and beyond. The Sesnon Gallery at UC Santa Cruz encourages interdisciplinary discourse through the lens of the arts.