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Visualizing Abolition Online Event Series

What does it mean to think of abolitionism as a vision—one that challenges the social, economic, and political worldviews that prisons promote?

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October 20, 2020 May 31, 2021

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A garden built to the size specifications of a solitary prison cell.

About this event

An ongoing online series examining incarceration

UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with Gina Dent, associate professor, feminist studies, presents a series of online events featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition.

Visualizing Abolition is organized by Professor Gina Dent, Feminist Studies and Dr. Rachel Nelson, Director, Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.

Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

October 20, 2020

Visualizing Abolition

Angela Davis and Gina Dent | Featured Music Video – Terri Lyne Carrington and Lisa Fischer

October 27, 2020

Images, Memory, and Justice

Bryan Stevenson | Featured Music Video – Kris Davis, Val Jeanty and Lily Finnegan

November 17, 2020

Visuality and Carceral Formations

Bryan Stevenson | Featured Music Video – Kris Davis, Val Jeanty and Lily Finnegan

December 1, 2020

Abolition Then and Now

Isaac Julien and Robin D.G. Kelley | Featured Music Video – Nicholas Payton

January 19, 2021

Prisons, Histories, and Erasures

Kelly Lytle Hernández, Joanne Barker, Maria Gaspar | Featured Music Video – Jason Moran and Kyle Abraham

January 26, 2021

Prisons and Poetics

Reginald Dwayne Betts, Craig Haney and Gina Dent | Featured Music Video – Malcolm-Jamal Warner

February 2, 2021

Surveillance and Cinematics

American Artist Simone Browne and Ruha Benjamin | Featured Music Video – Cécile McLorin Salvant

February 9, 2021

Material and Memory

Sanford Biggers and Leigh Raiford | Featured Music Video – Nicole Mitchell

Febrary 23, 2021

Abolitionist Feminisms

Beth Richie, Erica Meiners, and Sonya Clark | Featured Music Video – Sarah Elizabeth Charles

March 3, 2021

Art, Abolition, and the University

Ashley Hunt, MJ Hart, Alberto Lule, Ryan Flaco Rising, and Rodrigo Vazquez | Featured Music Video – Orrin Evans and Eric Revis

March 9, 2021

Popular Culture and the Radical Imaginary

Patrisse Cullors and Maxwell Addae | Featured Music Video – Chief Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah

April 6, 2021

Abolition Beyond the State

Sadie Barnette, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Zoé Samudzi, and Eric Stanley | Featured Music Video – Elena and Samora Pinderhughes

April 12, 2021

Abolition from the Inside Out

jackie sumell Albert Woodfox, and Tim Young | Featured Music Video – José James

April 20, 2021

(Re)Enacting Revolution

Dread Scott and Erin Gray | Featured Music Video – Dianne Reeves and Camila Cortina Bello

May 11, 2021

Futures

Sora Han, Adrienne Maree Brown, and Savannah Shange | Featured Music Video – Terri Lyne Carrington + Social Science

May 11, 2021

Music for Abolition

Curator Terri Lyne Carrington and guests
Lisa Fischer, Maimouna Youssef aka “Mumu Fresh”, Queen Cora Coleman, Nicholas Payton, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Nicole Mitchell, Sarah Elizabeth Charles, Orrin Evans, Eric Revis, Dianne Reeves, and Camila Cortina Bello