Imagining Abolitionist Futures

Join us on Friday, January 27th from 4:30pm - 7:00pm for the Artist Talk & Opening Reception of Currently, featuring the work of artist Mark Menjívar. 4:30pm Artist Talk with Reception to follow.

Mark Menjívar is a San Antonio based artist and Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University. His art practice primarily consists of creating participatory projects while being rooted in photography, oral history, archives, and social action.

Currently is a participatory exhibition organized by artist Mark Menjívar that looks deeply at capital punishment in the United States. Through maps, signs, collaborative timelines, a reading table and spaces for imagination, visitors are invited to reflect on the complicated nature of state-sanctioned violence. Visitors will be invited to participate in ongoing collective research and leave reflections directly on the gallery walls, which will then become a publication at the close of the exhibition.

More information at the Currently exhibit site

Currently is part of Imagining Abolitionist Futures. Support for the exhibition has been provided by Haverford College’s John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, Office of the President, Office of the Provost, and English Department.

Let’s Get Free: The Transformative Art and Activism of the People’s Paper Co-op showcases nearly ten years of cultural organizing campaigns and collaborative public art by the People’s Paper Co-op (PPC), an ongoing project of The Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia. Looking to women in reentry as society’s leading criminal justice experts, the PPC uses art to amplify their stories, dreams, and visions for a more just and free world. Curated by Raquel de Anda, Sharita Towne, and Daniel Tucker, the exhibition explores the PPC’s work as a model for effecting change through art and helping free people from an exceptionally adversarial and punitive criminal justice system.

Opening Reception

Friday, March 24, 5pm-7pm
Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery

More information is available at the Let's Get Free exhibit site

This symposium gathers scholars, artists, activists, and educators who share a common goal: dismantling the carceral state and ending the direct and indirect violence it inflicts every day, especially on our most vulnerable communities. Over the course of a day and a half, they will prompt both one another and symposium attendees to consider the roles that the arts and humanities can play in this ongoing struggle. Discussion topics will include: art and music by and about incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people; historical and archival research, Black study, counter memory, and the meaning of abolition; feminist and LGBTQ anticarceral expression and movements; cultural institutions and the distribution of resources that maintain or disrupt the carceral state; and the COVID pandemic’s ongoing disparate effects on incarcerated people.

More information and schedule at the Imagining Abolitionist Futures: The Symposium site

Paper, perhaps surprisingly, is a key part of the prison experience. Paper gets you in and sometimes gets you free. Chasing paper on the front is the catalyst to cuffs for many; making papers -- that is, parole -- is the hope of freedom for others. Inside, letters from family are lifelines, earning the slang moniker “kite” and there is an edge of exhilaration when a kite is slipped into a cell by a guard during mail call or under a cell door by another prisoner. For years after my release, I carried around a slip of paper in my wallet. A receipt for twenty-five dollars and seventy-one cent, the last of the money I’d earned working for 45 cent an hour in a Virginia prison. The experience is marked by paper. Transforming the paper into art complexities the experience, makes it more than loss, more than the account for crimes and prison time that seem to stalk.

Felon: An America Washi Tale is about re-imagining paper. A solo performance that begins with the pages of a book being slid into a cell, traverses stoves made of toilet paper, kites from a father, handwritten affidavits, legal complaints, handmade paper, certificates of pardon, & 1,000 squares fashioned from the clothing of men serving life sentences, the variety of papers that reveals what is possible and burdened by prison. Here, I weave traditional theater, poetry, fine art, and Japanese paper making aesthetic principles into a meditation on my own experiences of incarceration and my legal work to free friends that are still in prison. This reflection on the challenges of living in the shadow of mass incarceration is a story of violence, love, and fatherhood. The set is a collaboration created by Kyoko Ibe from "prison paper" that Ruth Lignen constructed from the clothes of men I first met in prison, each of whom were still in prison during the earliest stages of this project. Directed by Elisa Theron, this Washi Tale moves literally and metaphorically beyond my own life, unwrapping the disturbing ways that prison touches us all.

BL Shirelle is the Co-Executive Director of Die Jim Crow Records, the first non-profit record label for currently and formerly incarcerated artists in United States history. She is also a phenomenal songwriter/rapper, producer and justice-impacted artist herself, raising up her community and sharing her art and activism with the world.

Her label debut solo album Assata Troi, which she also executive produced, garnered critical acclaim from Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, NPR, Passion of Weiss, BBC, Interview Magazine, and Philadelphia Inquirer, among others. Assata Troi is an epic fusion of hard-hitting poetry, rap, and r&b with a gritty rock edge.

BL Shirelle has been a guest speaker at Augustana University, Stockton University, Goucher University, and Susquehanna University and is a teacher assistant at Yale Divinity School of Music and Wesleyan University. She has performed at MoMA PS 1 and at DJC virtual performances during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to raise funds for PPE Into Prisons alongside such acts as DIIV, Eve 6, Hurray For The Riff Raff and Shamir, among others.

Sponsored by HCAH, SALT (Students for Abolition, Liberation and Transformation), FUCS (Federation United Concert Series), and GRASE (The Center for Gender Resources and Sexual Education).

Participants will be invited to respond to a letter written by someone on death row that speaks about their experiences and the trauma they and their families have faced post-conviction.

Mark Menjívar is a San Antonio based artist and Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University. His work explores diverse subjects through photography, archives, oral history and participatory project structures. He holds a BA in Social Work from Baylor University and an MFA in Social Practice from Portland State University. He has engaged in projects at venues including the Rothko Chapel, Eastern State Penitentiary, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the University of Arizona Art Museum, The Puerto Rican Museum of Art and Culture, Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum and the Krannert Art Museum.

Mark is the artist-in-residence with the Texas After Violence Project, a community-based archive and documentary project cultivating deeper understandings of the impacts of state-sanctioned violence on individuals, families, and communities. He is also a member of Borderland Collective, which utilizes collaborations between artists, educators, youth, and community members to engage complex issues and build space for diverse perspectives, meaningful dialogue, and modes of creation around border issues.

Organized by Lindsay Reckson, Associate Professor of English, Haverford College. Sponsored by the Department of English as part of Imagining Abolitionist Futures.

More people are imprisoned in the United States at this moment than in any other time or place in history, yet the prison itself has never felt further away or more out of sight. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is a film about the prison in which we never see a penitentiary. Instead, the film unfolds as a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives, from a California mountainside where female prisoners fight raging wildfires, to a Bronx warehouse full of goods destined for the state correctional system, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs.

Co-presented with Lightbox Film Center as cinéSPEAK as part of this year's STRANGE TRUTH 2022-23 Film Series.

Brett Story is a non-fiction filmmaker, writer and geographer based out of Toronto. Her films have screened in theatres and festivals widely, including at CPH-DOX, SXSW, Sheffield Doc Fest, and other international festivals. She is the director of the award-winning films The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) and The Hottest August (2019), and author of the book Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America. Brett holds a PhD in human geography and her work has received support from the Sundance Institute and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto.

Robert Saleem Holbrook is the Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center, a law project dedicated to ending race and class based discrimination in the criminal justice system and all forms of state violence.

Prior to being named Executive Director of ALC he was its Director of Community Organizing responsible for expanding ALC into Philadelphia. He also led ALC’s campaigns against Death By Incarceration (Life Without Parole), Solitary Confinement and State Violence. He has worked with the Center for Constitutional Rights to end Death By Incarceration sentences in the United States and the National Unlock The Box Campaign to End Solitary Confinement.

He is a co-founder of the Human Rights Coalition, an organization with chapters in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh that is composed of family members of prisoners. HRC advocates on behalf of the civil and human rights of prisoners. He is also a co-founder of the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration in Pennsylvania, an advocacy group fighting to end Life without Parole Sentences. He sits on the advisory boards of the Amistad Law Project and Youth Arts and Empowerment Project.

While incarcerated, Saleem wrote extensively on prison abuse, social injustice, state violence and juveniles charged and sentenced as adults. His writings were featured in Truthout, The Appeal, San Francisco Bay View, and Solitary Watch. He was released from prison in 2018 after spending over two decades incarcerated for an offense he was convicted of as a child offender.

Stephanie D. Keene is a Philadelphia-based educator, creator, and organizer. Her justice work focuses on abolition (including but not limited to the prison industrial complex). A proud graduate of the first HBCU, Lincoln University, she is working for the freedom of all people.

Gustavus Stadler is William R. Kenan Professor of English and Director of the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College. His writing and research are concerned with the cultural history of the U. S. left.