The IAS galleries are closed for installation. We will open our next exhibition on May 23, 2025.
The IAS galleries are closed for installation. We will open our next exhibition on May 23, 2025.
Fostering art, research, and education to imagine— and build— a world without prisons.
Visualizing Abolition is a public scholarship initiative at University of California, Santa Cruz designed to shift the social attachment to prisons through art and education. Working across prison borders and in collaboration with current and formerly incarcerated people, as well as those without that lived experience, the overarching goal is to change the narrative that links prisons to justice, contributing instead to the unfolding collective story and alternative imagining underway to create a future free of prisons.
Prisons are so ingrained in history and the cultural imagination as to appear inevitable. Yet as long as prisons have existed, alternatives have flourished. Seeing through Stone accompanies the largest-ever exhibition emerging from the movement for prison abolition in the United States. The art and texts in this catalog explore the shared capacity for the radical sight permeating through prison walls, and include contributions from artists, writers and activists both currently and formerly incarcerated, alongside those without that lived experience. Over 80 artists and collectives from around the world contribute work, while the original texts are authored by Gina Dent, Lauren Schell Dickens, Rachel Nelson, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Nane Alejandrez, and Robin D.G. Kelley.
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