Please join us on Tuesday, April 30, from 6-7 pm for a performance titled Eshina lyo ku topa topa / Typewriter, presented by artist Tuli Mekondjo. 

In Eshina lyo ku topa topa / Typewriter, Mekondjo stages a ceremonial offering to her Namibian women ancestors.

This performance takes cues from the German colonial enterprise in Namibia (1884-1919), transforming a moment of imagined colonial communication into a space for ancestral honoring. Incorporating sonic and visual elements such as photography, typewriters, and whistles, the artist explores how communication and transportation technologies were used to support the colonial project of extraction and ethnic cleansing in Namibia. Imagining a short-circuited communication between German officers, Mekondjo channels into this space, instead, the spirits of Namibian women who labored as domestic and railway construction workers during the colonial era.

Drawing on her ongoing research into pre-colonial Aawambo fertility dolls, Mekondjo carries a doll on her back to honor her ancestors and reflect on the losses experienced during her lifetime and the preceding decades: “This doll is an embodiment of every single ancestor, every single relative that I never met.”

This event is presented as part of the gallery exhibition Cantando Bajito: Testimonies on view now through May 4.

Image courtesy of Scherz Collection, Basler Afrika Bibliographien

About the artist

Tuli Mekondjo

Tuli Mekondjo (b.1982 Angola) is a Namibian artist whose richly multifaceted practice considers the sociohistorical context of Namibia as a site to re-evaluate and consider ideas around ancestry and identity. Mekondjo lives and works in Windhoek, Namibia. Known for her mixed media and embroidered paintings, Mekondjo’s rigorous practice is a pursuit to connect with and honor her Namibian heritage.  Her practice in both mixed media and performance navigates feelings of displacement, having spent her childhood in refugee camps in Angola and Zambia during the Namibian War of Independence. Sensitive explorations of history and ancestry allow Mekondjo to address, question, and heal parts of this past, deftly weaving personal and collective trauma with beauty, nature, and optimism.

Join exhibition curators Isis Awad, Roxana Fabius, and Beya Othmani for a guided tour of the exhibition Cantando Bajito: Testimonies.

Artwork: Maternal Exhumations II , 2023 by Dima Srouji

About the curators

Isis Awad

Isis Awad is a curator, writer, and poet from Cairo, Egypt. She is the Founding Director of Executive Care*, a self-as-organization curatorial practice at the service of trans and queer artists of color from performance and nightlife. She also organizes national conferences aiming to find solutions for youth homelessness as Events Manager with the nonprofit organization, Point Source Youth. She was Exhibitions and Development Manager at Participant Inc in New York from 2018-19, and the MFA Exhibition Coordinator at The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College from 2021-2022. Her writing has been published by The Brooklyn Rail, ArtAsiaPacific Magazine, Art Papers, BOMB Magazine, Topical Cream, and Movement Research Journal.

Roxana Fabius

Roxana Fabius is a Uruguayan curator and art administrator based in New York City. Between 2016 and 2022 she was Executive Director at A.I.R. Gallery, the first artist-run feminist cooperative space in the U.S. During her tenure at A.I.R. she organized programs and exhibitions with artists and thinkers such as Gordon Hall, Elizabeth Povinelli, Jack Halberstam, Che Gosset, Regina José Galindo, Lex Brown, Kazuko, Zarina, Mindy Seu, Naama Tzabar, and Howardena Pindell among many others. These exhibitions, programs and special commissions were made in collaboration with international institutions such as the Whitney Museum, Google Arts and Culture, The Feminist Institute, and Frieze Art Fair in New York and London. Fabius has served as an adjunct professor for the Curatorial Practices seminar at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Tel Aviv University. She has also taught at Parsons at The New School, City University of New York, Syracuse University, and Rutgers University. She is currently curating the 2024 exhibition series “Cantando Bajito” at the Ford Foundation Gallery.

Beya Othmani

Beya Othmani is an art curator and researcher from Algeria and Tunisia, dividing her time between Tunis and New York. Currently, she is the C-MAP Africa Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Her recent curatorial projects include the Ljubljana 35th Graphic Arts Biennial and Publishing Practices #2 at Archive Berlin. Previously, she took part in the curatorial teams of various projects with sonsbeek20→24 (2020), the Forum Expanded of the Berlinale (2019), and the Dak’Art 13 Biennial (2018), among others, and was a curatorial assistant at the Berlin-based art space, SAVVY Contemporary. Some of her latest curatorial projects explored radical feminist publishing practices, post-colonial histories of print-making, and the construction of racial identities in art in colonial and post-colonial Africa.

Please join us on Thursday, March 7 from 5-7pm for a conversation with Gabrielle Goliath and Tina Campt. The speakers will discuss Goliath’s powerful and celebrated sound installation This song is for… (2019-) which is making its U.S. premiere in Cantando Bajito: Testimonies. The conversation will explore frequencies of Black life, thinkings around refusal and hapticity, and collaborative testimonial encounters.

This event is presented as part of the gallery exhibition Cantando Bajito: Testimonies on view March 5 through May 4.

About the speakers

Gabrielle Goliath

Through the ritual, sonic and social encounters of her art practice, Gabrielle Goliath (b.1983, South Africa) attends (and tends) to histories and present-day conditions of differentially valued life, reaffirming ways in which black, brown, femme and queer practices of possibility perform the world differently. Each of her works convenes a coming-to – a tenuous community – collapsing the presumed remove and privileged subject position of representation (as white, male, heteronormative) and calling for meetings in and across difference, in terms of complicity, relation and love.

Goliath’s immersive, often durational installations have shown across South Africa and internationally. She has won several awards including a Future Generation Art Prize – Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including TATE Modern, Frac Bretagne, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum. She lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Tina Campt

Tina Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. She began her career as a historian of modern Germany, earning a Ph.D. in history from Cornell University. She is one of the founding scholars of Black European Studies, and her early work theorized gender, racial, and diasporic formation in black communities in Europe and southern Africa, with an emphasis on the role of vernacular photography in historical interpretation. Campt’s more recent scholarship bridges the divide between vernacular image-making in black diasporic communities and the interventions of black contemporary artists in reshaping how we see ourselves and our societies. Her teaching reflects her ongoing interest in exploring the multiple sensory registers of images and the importance of attending to their sonic and haptic registers.

Campt has published five books and received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year Award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation for her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis, Steidl, 2020). Campt has held faculty positions at Brown University, Barnard College-Columbia University, Duke University, University of California-Santa Cruz, and the Technical University of Berlin.

The Ford Foundation Gallery is pleased to present Cantando Bajito: Testimonies curated by Isis Awad, Roxana Fabius, and Beya Othmani on view March 5 – May 4, 2024.

Please join us for the opening celebration on Tuesday, March 5th, 5 – 7pm.

Translated into English as “singing softly,” the exhibition series title is drawn from a phrase used by Dora María Téllez Argüello, a now-liberated Nicaraguan political prisoner, to describe the singing exercises she did while she was incarcerated in isolation. Helping her to conserve her voice and defeat the political terror she endured, Téllez’s quiet singing became a powerful strategy for survival and resistance.

Cantando Bajito: Testimonies features artists who explore forms of creative resistance in the wake of widespread gender-based violence, and build on strategies to imagine new forms of existing and thriving. The artworks reveal the methods individuals use to navigate violence, including the value of the testimonial, community-building, moving together in space, and subversive, even humorous, gestures that provide sustenance and pleasure. Grounded in a concept of testimony as an act that bears witness publicly, not limited to the spoken or written statement, Testimonies considers artworks as testimonial objects that carry a political memory of feminized bodies. 

With special thanks to members of the Cantando Bajito curatorial advisory group: María Carri, Zasha Colah, Maria Catarina Duncan, Kobe Ko, Marie Hélène Pereira, Mindy Seu, and Susana Vargas Cervantes.

Image: Leonilda González, Novias revolucionarias I (Revolutionary brides I), 1968. Courtesy of Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales (MNAV) Uruguay. Photo Sebastian Bach.

Join us on Monday, November 20 from 6-8pm for a fireside chat with Ruha Benjamin, author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, and Paul Holdengräber, is an interviewer and curator; he was the founding executive director of Onassis Los Angeles, and the previous director of New York Public Library’s public programming and founder of the LIVE from NYPL cultural series. Ruha Benjamin will speak in conversation with Holdengräber about ethics in AI and the role these algorithms play in shaping our world, through their impacts on equity, justice, and power distribution. 

This event is presented as part of the current gallery exhibition What Models Make Worlds on view through December 9 and presented in partnership with Occidental College and OXY ARTS program Oxy Live!

Live captioning will be provided.

About the speakers

Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, among many other publications. Her work investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, knowledge and power. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. Her most recent book, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, winner of the 2023 Stowe Prize, was born out of the twin plagues of COVID-19 and police violence and offers a practical and principled approach to transforming our communities and helping us build a more just and joyful world. 

Paul Holdengräber is an interviewer and curator. He was the Founding Executive Director of Onassis Los Angeles (OLA). Previously, and for 14 years, he was Founder and Director of The New York Public Library’s LIVE from the NYPL cultural series where he interviewed and hosted over 600 events, holding conversations with everyone from Patti Smith to Zadie Smith, Ricky Jay to Jay-Z, Errol Morris to Jan Morris, Wes Anderson to Helen Mirren, Werner Herzog to Mike Tyson. Before his tenure at the Library, Holdengräber was the Founder and Director of “The Institute for Art & Cultures” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and has taught at Princeton University, Williams College, Claremont Graduate University among others. In 2003, the French Government named Holdengräber Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and then promoted him in 2012 to the rank of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 2010, The President of Austria awarded him the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art.

Join us on Tuesday, October 31 from 6-8pm for an artists’ talk with Stephanie Dinkins and Mimi Ọnụọha. The artists will speak about their work featured in What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI in conversation with moderator Salome Asega, Director of NEW INC. 

Mimi Ọnụọha’s Library of Missing Datasets series assembles the blank spaces in a sprawling datascape. Through a filing cabinet with empty or concealed files, the artist shows us what is rendered invisible or intentionally hidden. Stephanie Dinkins’ Conversations with Bina48 (Fragment 11) documents encounters with Bina48, a social robot developed to reflect the beliefs and memories of a Black woman, revealing that Bina48’s coding has given her no meaningful awareness of Blackness, race, or racialization. Dinkins’ N’TOO redresses this algorithmic erasure by offering a framework for co-authoring alternative models of AI. For this work, featured in What Models Make Worlds, an interactive intelligence trained with data drawn from oral histories by the artist’s family generates a “multigenerational memoir of a Black American family.”

This event is presented as part of the current gallery exhibition What Models Make Worlds on view through December 9.

Live captioning will be provided. 

About the speakers

Recently named an influencer on Time Magazine’s list of The 100 Most Influential People in AI, Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist who creates experiences that spark dialog about race, gender, aging, and our future histories.  Her work in AI and other mediums uses emerging technologies and social collaboration to work toward technological ecosystems based on care and social equity. Dinkins’ experiences with and explorations of artificial intelligence have led to a deep interest in how algorithmic systems impact communities of color in particular and all of our futures more generally.   

Dinkins’ experiments with AI have led full circle to recognize the stories, myths, and cultural perspectives, aka data, that we hold and share form and inform society and have done so for millennia. She has concluded that our stories are our algorithms. We must value, grow, respect, and collaborate with each other’s stories (data) to build care and broadly compassionate values into the technological ecosystems that increasingly support our future.

Nigerian-American artist Mimi Ọnụọha‘s work deploys choice moments of seeming absence to question and expose the contradictory logics of technological progress. Through print, code, data, video, installation, and archival media, Ọnụọha offers new orientations for making sense of the gaps that define systems of labor, ecology, and relations.

Ọnụọha’s recent solo exhibitions include bitforms gallery (USA) and Forest City Gallery (Canada). Her work has been featured at the Whitney Museum of Art (USA), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (AUS), Mao Jihong Arts Foundation (China), La Gaitê Lyrique (France), Transmediale Festival (Germany), The Photographers Gallery (UK), and NEON (Greece) among others. Her public art engagements have been supported by Akademie der Kunst (Germany), the Royal College of Art (UK), the Rockefeller Foundation (USA), and Princeton University (USA).

Salome Asega (she/her) is an artist, researcher, and educator working between participatory design and emerging technology. Salome believes in leveraging the power of collective imagination to redistribute power, change culture, and shift policy. Before joining the NEW INC team in 2021, she worked at the Ford Foundation as a Technology Fellow supporting artists and organizations in the new media arts ecosystem. Salome has participated in residencies and fellowships with Eyebeam, The Laundromat Project, and Recess and has exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale, MoMA, Carnegie Library, August Wilson Center, Knockdown Center, and more. Since 2015, Salome has been teaching studio and design methodology courses in the MFA Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design.

Join exhibition curators Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, associate professor of technology & social justice at ArtCenter College of Design, and Meldia Yesayan, director of OXY ARTS, for a guided tour of the exhibition What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI.

About Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

Born in Yerevan, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Armenian writer, artist, and researcher residing in Glendale, CA. She is an associate professor in technology and social justice at ArtCenter College of Design and was formerly a visiting Mellon professor of the practice at Occidental College. Her book, The Institute for Other Intelligences, was released by X Artists’ Books in December 2022 as the first in its X topics series and edited by Ana Iwataki and Anuradha Vikram. She is the guest co-editor of the spring 2023 issue of Art Papers on artificial intelligence, co-edited with Sarah Higgins. She holds a PhD in history of art from the University of Pennsylvania.

Her writing and commentary have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Performance Research Journal, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Art Papers, Hyperallergic, Georgia Journal, Art in America, AI Now Institute’s “New AI Lexicon” series, and Meghan Markle’s Archetypes. With Avi Alpert and Danny Snelson, she makes up one-third of Research Service, a media collective that pursues performative and practice-based forms of scholarship. Her current book project considers the role of ancestral intelligence and diasporic worldmaking in emerging technologies.

About Meldia Yesayan

Meldia Yesayan is the director of OXY ARTS, the multidisciplinary arts programming initiative at Occidental College. She oversees all aspects of its programming and development, including organizing all exhibitions and programs, facilitating visiting artist residencies such as the Wanlass artist-in-residence program, initiating cross-departmental and interdisciplinary collaborations, and engaging the Occidental community in socially conscious discourse with contemporary arts practices. She is also responsible for developing meaningful and sustained relationships with the Los Angeles area arts communities, including partnerships with local arts agencies, artists, and institutions.

Prior to OXY ARTS, Yesayan was the managing director of Machine Project, a groundbreaking arts collective nationally recognized for its inventive engagement based programming and partnerships with museums and academic institutions across the country. In this role, she led the production of more than 300 public projects and worked with a diverse group of artists across disciplines. Prior to Machine Project, she held leadership positions at Sotheby’s auction house and Muse Film and Television. She is often called on by state and local arts agencies and foundations to serve on review and selection committees for grant and artist selections and has contributed to Art Papers and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds a JD and BA from UCLA and is a USPAP certified fine art appraiser.

About OXY ARTS

OXY ARTS is Occidental College’s public art center. Rooted in social justice and community engagement, it is a vital public space for discovery, engagement, and learning at the intersection of art, culture, and social movements. OXY ARTS is located in the heart of the Highland Park neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles and is committed to facilitating projects that hold space for complex ideas and dialogue, spark curiosity, and invest in artists and community growth.

The Ford Foundation Gallery is pleased to present What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI, curated by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Meldia Yesayan on view September 7 – December 9, 2023. Please join us for the opening celebration on Thursday, September 7, 6 – 8pm featuring a special performance by artist Lauren Lee McCarthy.

In computer science, algorithmic models are used to forecast and visualize prospective futures. Beyond recent large language models (ChatGPT) and image generators (DALL-E, Midjourney), modeling is also used in predictive policing, judicial risk assessment, automated hiring, and elsewhere. These models structure our present, projecting worlds marked by radically asymmetrical power distributions. Invoking the various meanings of “modeling,” the exhibition assembles the work of artists who map the limits of our current algorithmic imaginaries and move beyond them in acts of critical world building.

What Models Make Worlds was originally presented as Encoding Futures at OXY ARTS, the public art space and cultural platform of Occidental College, from September-November 2021. The exhibition is curated by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, associate professor of technology and social justice at ArtCenter College of Design and Meldia Yesayan, director of OXY ARTS.

Please join us on Monday, June 26 from 6-8pm for a conversation with Dr. Baz Dreisinger and artist Hank Willis Thomas, who conceived and developed the traveling installation The Writing on the Wall, and Michelle Woo, Co-founder of For Freedoms, on their work featured in “No Justice Without Love.”

The conversation, moderated by the exhibition’s guest curator Daisy Desrosiers, will explore the power of the collective to support transformative connection among artists. The panelists will discuss how collaboration and mutual support can amplify artists’ work by sparking creativity through interconnected artistic aims.

Dr. Dreisinger will be joined by two graduates of the Prison-to-College pipeline, a program that works to increase access to higher education for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals: Matthew Wilson and Devon Simmons, who created most of the graphic illustrations included in The Writing on the Wall. Mr. Incredible, another program graduate, will open the evening with a poetry reading.

About the speakers

Mr. Incredible (TWOTW) 8 years and 5 months of Prison and he’s broken every statistical narrative. Transcended his misdirected energy toward physical fitness to transform lives !! Brooklyn’s #1 Health Coach. A reborn poet through Prison-to- College Pipeline / which taught him how to use words to paint his feelings and perspective of the world.

Daisy Desrosiers is an interdisciplinary art historian and the current director and chief curator of Kenyon College’s Gund Gallery. Previously, she was a co-curator of the first MOCA Toronto Triennale, GTA21, and also served as the inaugural director of Artist Programs at the Lunder Institute for American Art at the Colby College Museum of Art. Earlier in her career, she was the inaugural Nicholas Fox Weber curatorial fellow with the Glucksman Museum in Cork, Ireland and a curatorial fellow at Brooklyn-based nonprofit, Art in General. This year she is also part of the Center of Curatorial Leadership (CCL) cohort of 2023. She contributed to the 2021 New Museum Triennial publication and As We Rise (Aperture, 2021). Desrosiers is currently working on a monographic publication about artist Tau Lewis with the National Gallery of Canada.

Dr. Baz Dreisinger (TWOTW) is the Founding Executive Director of Incarceration Nations Network, a global network that promotes prison reform and justice reimagining worldwide; a Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York; the founder of John Jay’s groundbreaking Prison-to-College Pipeline program, which provides university-level education and reentry assistance to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people throughout New York State; the author of the critically acclaimed book Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World, named a notable book for 2016 by the Washington Post; and the director of Incarceration Nations: A Global Docuseries, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival 2021. A 2018 Global Fulbright Scholar and current Fulbright Scholar Specialist, Dr. Baz speaks regularly about justice issues on international media and in myriad settings around the world, and is also a journalist who writes and produces for such outlets as The New York Times And National Public Radio (NPR).

Devon Simmons (TWOTW) is the Co-Founder and Associate Director of the Paralegal Pathways Initiative at Columbia Law School. He conceived the program in collaboration with students and faculty in pursuit of leveraging the talents of people who have gained legal skills while incarcerated. The program is designed to hone their skills in hopes of connecting them with employment opportunities in the legal field, while simultaneously enabling law students to challenge their assumptions and engage with formerly incarcerated people prior to entering a courtroom setting through Experiential Learning. He is a Global Atlantic Fellow, Salzburg Global Fellow, 2019 Soros Justice Fellow, and 2017 David Rockefeller Fund Fellow. In 2012, while incarcerated at Otisville Correctional Facility, he enrolled in John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Prison-to-College Pipeline program. Soon after his release following 15 1/2 years of imprisonment, he obtained his AA (with Honors) from Hostos Community College becoming the first graduate of the program. Subsequently, he graduated summa cum laude from John Jay with a BS in Criminal Justice. As the International Ambassador for the Incarceration Nations Network, he has traveled to South Africa, Cuba, Jamaica and U.K. in an effort to help establish Prison-to-College Pipeline programs internationally. He is also a curator for the Writing on The Wall Installation.

https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/former-jailhouse-lawyer-creates-legal-jobs-program-f or-the-formerly-incarcerated

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/us/prison-college-graduate-devon-simmons.html

Hank Willis Thomas (TWOTW and For Freedoms) is a conceptual artist widely known for his investigations of themes relating to mass media, identity, popular culture, and perspective. A trained photographer, the artist works across many disciplines and media, including sculpture, film, screen-printing, and installation. In his practice, Thomas often seeks out and utilizes recognizable icons from popular branding and marketing campaigns, encouraging viewers to question commercial consumer representation and the racial stereotypes it perpetuates.

He is also renowned for his public artworks, which always invite a form of viewer participation and contribution. Among his recent public projects is the large-scale bronze sculpture The Embrace (2023), unveiled on the Boston Common in January 2023. Thomas is the co-founder of For Freedoms, an artist-led organization that models and increases creative civic engagement. In 2022, For Freedoms received the National Art Award from Americans for the Arts, and it was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform in 2017. In addition to For Freedoms, Thomas’s collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth) and The Writing on the Wall.

The artist’s work has been exhibited at institutions throughout the United States and abroad.
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship; The Guggenheim Fellowship; the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize; and the Soros Equality Fellowship, among other awards and honors.

Thomas earned a BFA from New York University in 1998 and an MA/MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2004. He has received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore; the San Francisco Art Institute; and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in Portland, Maine. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Matthew Wilson (TWOTW) is the first Prison-to-College Pipeline Program student to earn a Master’s Degree, studying Sociology at St. John’s University. His academic work focuses on race in media and also access to gainful employment for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people who have engaged in higher education programs has led to his work being published in the university’s Social Sciences departments E-zine. Matthew also earned a BA in Communication and Media Management from St. John’s in 2021, and an AA in Liberal Arts and Humanities with a focus in Film and Television in 2019. Matthew is a 2021 Jack Kent Cooke Graduate School Scholarship Winner, 2019 Jack Kent Cooke Undergrad Transfer Scholar, 2018 LaGuardia Mellon Humanities Fellow, and 2018 Victor Hasssine Award Winner. He also co-leads the New York Region of The Petey Greene Program as Division Manager since the Fall of 2021 where he supports adults and youth with high-quality academic tutoring support, enrollment, and advisement when they re-enter the community.

Michelle Woo (For Freedoms) is a cultural producer, art historian and curator based in Los Angeles. She is a Co-Founder of For Freedoms, an artist-run organization that models creative civic engagement for which she received a ICP Infinity Award in 2017 and a National Art Award in 2022. Her diverse role includes strategy and design of national campaigns, public art initiatives, exhibitions and programming. She also advises artists and organizations on business management and cultural strategy.

For Freedoms is an artist collective that centers art and creativity as a catalyst for transformative connection and collective liberation. By wielding the power of art, they aim to deepen and expand our capacity to interrogate what is and imagine what could be. Together, they seek infinite expansion.

Leading up to the 2016 elections in the United States, For Freedoms asked how we could center artists’ voices in public discourse, broaden what participation in democracy looks like, and initiate a larger conversation about the role of art in local, national, and global politics.

What began as a one-off campaign has now evolved into an ongoing movement. For Freedoms has since produced artworks and run nationwide campaigns timed to significant political elections: in 2018 we conducted the 50 State Initiative, named by TIME as the “largest creative collaboration in United States history” and in 2020 they launched the 2020 Awakening, activating artists, museums, schools, corporations and civic organizations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and beyond.

For Freedoms has grown to become the largest community for creative civic engagement in the United States. They comprise thousands of artists and organizations working together to invite radical imagination and set the table for new national conversations.

For Freedoms maintains that if creativity is a core societal value, and if artists are at every table, new ideas are more likely to take hold. With that, we can build new systems that no longer rely on extractive or corrupt foundations but instead center love, care, and community. They are working toward a new economic model for art and culture while offering financial and education opportunities for artists.

Founded in 2016 by a coalition of artists, academics and organizers, including Hank Willis Thomas, Eric Gottesman, Michelle Woo, and Wyatt Gallery, For Freedoms continues to be artist-led and is dedicated to awakening a culture of listening, healing, and justice. They are invested in an infinite game— one where there are no winners versus losers, and one where the objective is for everyone to continue to play.

The Writing on the Wall is a shape-shifting, pop-up art installation made from writing by people in prison around the world, a partnership between Dr. Baz Dreisinger and the Incarceration Nations Network; the acclaimed visual artist Hank Willis Thomas; the nonprofit architecture firm MASS Design Group; the production team Openbox; and the creative agency Chemistry Creative. In an effort to center the words of those directly impacted at the heart of the fight for prison reimagining, the installation has been displayed in public spaces as a form of verbal and visual intrusion. Each debut of The Writing on the Wall is an event and ongoing campaign, coordinated in collaboration with local and global justice organizations and demanding that worldwide we must heed The Writing on the Wall: #DefundThePrisons and invest in communities and peace.

In myriad formats – as a pop-up in enclosed spaces, a collapsable booth and a series of light projections – The Writing on the Wall has thus far been exhibited in Detroit, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Miami, Washington DC, Columbus, and New York City on the High Line park, the most trafficked public park in the world.

The Writing on the Wall is a project of The Incarceration Nations Network (INN) a global network and think tank that supports, instigates and popularizes innovative prison reform efforts around the world. Their partners span every continent and more than 50 countries.

Please join us on Thursday, June 1 from 4-6pm for an artists’ talk with Jared Owens and Sherrill Roland. The artists will speak about their work featured in “No Justice Without Love” in conversation with the exhibition’s guest curator Daisy Desrosiers. Sherrill Roland’s sculpture “168.803,” 2021, following the lines of blocks used in building a prison cell, and Jared Owens’s “FBOP (Federal Bauhaus of Prisons),” 2022, an aerial view of a prison complex, both share new, illuminating perspectives on incarceration. Both artists’ works offer new ways of seeing the carceral system’s violences, and center the self-determination and humanity that transcend such structures.

About the speakers

Sherrill Roland’s interdisciplinary practice deals with concepts of innocence, identity, and community, reimagining their social and political implications in the context of the American criminal justice system. For more than three years, Roland’s right to self-determination was lost to a wrongful incarceration. After spending ten months in prison for a crime he was later exonerated for, he returned to his artistic practice, which he now uses as a vehicle for self-reflection and an outlet for emotional release. Converting the haunting nuances of his experiences into drawings, sculptures, multimedia objects, performances, and participatory activities, Roland shares his story and creates space for others to do the same, illuminating the invisible costs, damages, and burdens of incarceration.

Born in 1984 in Asheville, North Carolina, Sherrill Roland studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2018) and earned his MFA and BFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2017 and 2009). He has had solo exhibitions at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center, Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York (2019); Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Gallery, Georgetown University, Washington, DC (2019); Brooklyn Public Library (Central Library), Brooklyn, NY (2017); and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles (2017), among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA (2020); Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford, MA (2020); Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA (2019); CAM Houston, Houston (2018); and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2017). Roland is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award (2021); South Arts Southern Grand Prize & State Fellowship (2020); and was an Art for Justice Grantee (2020), in addition to many other awards and recognitions. He has had fellowships and residencies at Fountainhead, Miami; Duke University, Durham, NC; Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA, among others. Roland’s work is in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Fountainhead, Miami; and Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture, Charlotte, NC. He lives and works in Durham, NC.

Jared Owens (1968) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice focuses on bringing awareness to the plight of nearly 2.5 million people enmeshed in the American carceral state. He is self-taught during more than 18 years of incarceration, working in painting, sculpture, and installation, using materials and references culled from penal matter.

Jared Owens’s current and recent exhibitions include, “111… and other stories,” Malin Gallery, NY (2022); “Chosen Family,” Martos Gallery, NY (2021); “SHAG Right of Return” curated by Dana Gluck, Jesse Krimes, and Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, Spring Hill Arts Gathering, New Preston, CT (2021); “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood (2020-2021) at MoMA PS1, NY and traveling to Abroms-Engle Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham AL (2021), National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati, OH (2022), and the List Art Center, Brown University, Providence, RI (2022); “Rendering Justice” curated by Jesse Krimes, at the African American Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA (2021); “The O.G. Experience” in partnership with HBO and SOZE in Chelsea, NYC (2019); “Made in America: Unfree Labor in the Age of Mass Incarceration” curated by Amy Shannon Holiday at Hampshire College, Amhurst, NH (2017); “Black Bone: Affrilachian Poets and Visual Artists” curated by Bianca L. Spriggs at Morlan Gallery, Transylvania University, Lexington, KY (2017). Based in South Carolina from 2015-2021, Owens has shown with Mitchell Hill Gallery in Charleston twice, once as part of the Spoleto Arts Festival in 2015 and most recently in 2018. The first exhibition the artist had was in 2012, at Reflective Equilibrium, Little Berlin Gallery, Philadelphia, PA with Jesse Krimes, while still incarcerated.

In 2020, he received a Right of Return Fellowship from SOZE Agency, and in 2019 a Restorative Justice grant from Philadelphia Mural Arts to create a mural with teenagers under court supervision; in 2016-17 he was the recipient of a grant from the Eastern State Penitentiary to produce “Sepulture,” a large-scale installation. In 2022, Owens was awarded an Art for Justice Fellowship. He has twice received a fellowship from the Silver Arts Program at the World Trade Center in New York (2021 – 2022).

He has presented a number of talks and workshops, including the “Marking Time: Prison Arts and Activism” conference at Rutgers in New Brunswick, NJ, in 2014; “State Goods: Art in the Era of Mass Incarceration (with an installation) at Andrew Feldman House in the Bronx (2017); and “Prison Art and Prison Reform” at Eastern State Penitentiary (2017). He has run numerous workshops, including as program designer and lead instructor for the one-week intensive workshop “The Artist’s Eye” at the Lyric Theater in Lexington, KY (2016), and actively participates in panel discussions centered around mass incarceration and art.

Daisy Desrosiers is an interdisciplinary art historian and the current director and chief curator of Kenyon College’s Gund Gallery. Previously, she was a co-curator of the first MOCA Toronto Triennale, GTA21, and also served as the inaugural director of Artist Programs at the Lunder Institute for American Art at the Colby College Museum of Art. Earlier in her career, she was the inaugural Nicholas Fox Weber curatorial fellow with the Glucksman Museum in Cork, Ireland and a curatorial fellow at Brooklyn-based nonprofit, Art in General. This year she is also part of the Center of Curatorial Leadership (CCL) cohort of 2023. She contributed to the 2021 New Museum Triennial publication and As We Rise (Aperture, 2021). Desrosiers is currently working on a monographic publication about artist Tau Lewis with the National Gallery of Canada.