Art on Abolition
What does abolition look like, sound like, feel like? Art on Abolition includes work responding to this prompt juried from a national open call. Read the full curatorial statement in the “About Us” section of the website. The exhibition is organized thematically:
History and New Futures
History lives in the present, visibly and invisibly, memorialized in public and disappeared into private memories. Some of the works in this theme honor events, people, and structures of feeling that hover at the underside of memory and breathe life into possibilities for future transformations. Other works take the future as the present, offering a distanced reflection on current carceral practices.
Protest and Revolution
The contemporary abolitionist movement is part of a long struggle for freedom and liberation from carceral systems created to support white supremacy, colonialism, and inequality. Art that documents and celebrates these struggles can motivate and clarify, embolden and enrage, and offer inspiration for revolutionary change.
Finding Voice, Power, Joy
Carcerality silences, disappears, and destroys. Abolition validates, repairs, and liberates. These works show the power of art for finding voice - to challenge oppression, express joy, build community and solidarity, and claim shared humanity.
Liberation
What does liberation look like, sound like, move like, feel like? Art offers unique access to liberation’s sensoria, exhibited here in fantasy visions and soundwaves, movement and lyricism. The radical imagination and expression of freedom is liberatory.
