URI Providence Feinstein Campus Arts and Culture Program and
Brown University John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities present
States of Incarceration, August 29 – September 24, 2016
Gallery Night Reception on Thursday, September 15, 5-9pm with interactive pop-up performances and continuous screening of Denali Tiller’s documentary on children of incarcerated parents, Sons and Daughters of Incarceration.
States of Incarceration is the first national traveling multi-media exhibition on the history and future of mass incarceration in the United States. It was developed by faculty and students at twenty different universities across the country and was designed by the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Matter Practice with graphic designers Pure+Applied. The exhibition will travel to the home cities of each of the contributing universities from April 2016 – October 2018, with stops at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, CA; the International Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro, NC; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans and the Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs.
Brown University’s contribution to this traveling exhibition came out of History Professor Amy Remensnyder’s “Locked Up: A History of Prison and Captivity,” taught both at Brown and at the Adult Correctional Institution in Cranston in the fall of 2015. A group of on-campus students in this class developed the panels Brown submitted. In addition, the exhibition comprises close to twenty panels on incarceration; they tell personal stories, give historical context, analyze particular prisons and reveal the human face of this national trauma. The US has the largest prison population in the world, with 2,306,117 men and women currently incarcerated, giving us the second-highest per capita incarceration rate in the world.
In addition to the States of Incarceration panels, the Rhode Island exhibition includes local artwork that addresses the issue of mass incarceration. A collection of paintings and a series of screen-printed T-shirts made by youth in the Rhode Island Training School and by Providence youth artists was contributed by AS220, whose youth program works to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. Rhode Islanders Sponsoring Education (RISE) lent sixteen portraits of the students in this year’s graduating class, each of whom has a parent who is currently or has recently been incarcerated; these students receive financial support from the organization to attend private or parochial schools in the state (photographer: Peter Goldberg). Denali Tiller is showing a selection of powerful film stills from her documentary, Sons and Daughters of Incarceration, which follows the lives of children in Rhode Island with incarcerated parents. The exhibition also includes artwork by Jordan Seaberry and selections from “Voices From Within” a literary magazines that were produced in the 1980s-1990s by male and female inmates at the Department of Corrections’ Facilities under the direction of long-time warden Roberta Richman.
For more information, visit www.brown.edu/statesofincarceration; be a part of the conversation about the issues raised by this exhibition on Twitter at #StatesofIncarceration.
URI Feinstein Providence Campus 1st and 2nd floor Lobby Galleries
80 Washington Street, Providence, RI 02903
For Information call 401-277-5206 uri.artsandculture@gmail.com or visit web.uri.edu/prov/arts
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Gallery Night Providence 