Sesnon Online programming at UC Santa Cruz for Fall 2020
Study Guide
Barring Freedom creatively engages and educates multiple publics about issues of prisons, policing, and justice through an innovative traveling exhibition of contemporary art, a participatory public art project, and online events and programming around the theme of Visualizing Abolition.
Virtual launch hosted by the Institute of the Arts and Sciences
October 20, 2020, 4pm
Visualizing Abolition with a conversation between Angela Y. Davis and Gina Dent.
Barring Freedom at San José Museum of Art (in-person exhibition)
October 30, 2020 through April 25, 2021
Artists: American Artist; Sadie Barnette; Sanford Biggers; Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick; Sonya Clark; Sharon Daniel; Maria Gaspar, Ashley Hunt; Dee Hibbert-Jones; Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts; Deana Lawson; Sherrill Roland; Dread Scott; jackie sumell; Hank Willis Thomas; Patrice Renee Washington; Levester Williams.
To accompany the exhibition, Visualizing Abolition, a series of online events planned in collaboration with Gina Dent, associate professor, feminist studies, brings together artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to envisioning alternatives to ongoing injustices.
Visualizing Abolition events through April 25. 2021.
Sesnon Gallery event: Conversation with the Curators (ONLINE EVENT)
October 21, 2020 5:30pm
Join us for a conversation with Rachel Nelson and Alexandra Moore, co-curators of Barring Freedom, a contemporary art exhibition engaging issues of prisons, policing, and justice, on view at San José Museum of Art October 30-April 25, 2021. Attendees will be encouraged to participate in the discussion.
See Sesnon News and Events for related webinars and discussions
At the center of the multi-faceted, 18-month arts-based initiative, organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery, is a multi-sited group exhibition of contemporary art. Featuring works by some of the most influential contemporary artists in the United States, the exhibition aims to challenge the dominant ways people see and understand the complex nexus of policing, surveillance, detention, and imprisonment that makes up the nation’s prison industrial complex. With more than two million incarcerated people, a majority of them black or brown, virtually all of them from poor communities, the prison industrial complex reveals a troubled vision at the heart of the United States. Barring Freedom considers the strategies artists use to reveal this unjust worldview as well as the social problems it serves to obscure.
The motivation for Barring Freedom emerges from a deep history of scholarship and activism at UC Santa Cruz. Current and emeritus faculty at the university, including Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Craig Haney, Sharon Daniel, and Dee Hibbert-Jones, have for decades been powerful leaders in prison abolition and activism around solitary confinement and the death penalty. Barring Freedom seeks to build on that legacy and energize current research and activism.
While Barring Freedom was conceptualized before the current crises, first COVID-19, with its ongoing and unequal effects, and then the recent brutal onslaught of police killings of Black people in the United States have brought into sharp relief the horrific consequences of the structural racism in the nation. As the depths of the injustices come into focus, the teachings of Professor Davis serve as inspiration. Reflecting on mass incarceration and abolition, she cautions, “Dangerous limits have been placed on the very possibility of imagining alternatives.” It is with the urgency of the times that the exhibition underscores the importance of artists and creative practitioners in envisioning a world beyond the problems of policing and overflowing prisons that currently bar people from freedom in the United States.
Barring Freedom is curated by Rachel Nelson and Alexandra Moore.
Artists: American Artist, Sadie Barnette, Sanford Biggers, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, Sonya Clark, Sharon Daniel, Maria Gaspar, Ashley Hunt, Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman, Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts, Deana Lawson, Sherrill Roland, Dread Scott, jackie sumell, Hank Willis Thomas, Patrice Renee Washington, Prison Renaissance, and Levester Williams
Barring Freedom and Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery.
The initiative has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, the Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Campus partners include: Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, and the Center for Creative Ecologies.
Community partners include: San José Museum of Art, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, and Indexical.
