Visualizing Abolition is a public scholarship initiative at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences featuring art exhibitions, public events, artist commissions, a music series, postdoctoral fellowships, graduate student workshops, and curriculum development. These programs are designed to foster creative research and to shift the social attachment to prisons through art and education.

Working across prison borders in all aspects of the initiative, 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.

Visualizing Abolition is organized by Gina Dent and Rachel Nelson, with support from the Mellon Foundation. Music for Abolition is curated by Terri Lyne Carrington.