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Ashley Hunt | |
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Born | Los Angeles, California, U.S. | April 3, 1970
Alma mater | University of California, Irvine School of the Art Institute of Chicago |
Ashley Hunt (born April 3, 1970 in Los Angeles [1] [2] ) is an American artist, activist, writer and educator, primarily known for his photographic and video works on the American prison system, mass incarceration and the prison abolition movement. He is currently a faculty member of the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts. [3] [4] [5] [6]
Hunt’s work is often embedded within the activism and organizing of community organizations, tracing the histories, systems and proliferation of prisons throughout the US, while also exploring vision itself and how people fail to see the extent of incarceration’s impact, the relationship of captivity to the persistence of racism in the U.S., [7] and with what Hunt considers the visual politics of mass incarceration. [8] [4]
Hunt’s art and documentary works are known to push the boundaries between art and activism, often trying to bring the two together. [8] [9] His map-based artworks accompanied a growth in mapping and cartography in contemporary art and activist strategies in the mid-2000s. [10] [11] [12] [13] He has collaborated with other artists, including taisha paggett and her dance company, WXPT and Kim Zumpfe, [14] the artist group of Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Katya Sander and David Thorne, [15] [16] [17] and with Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Regina Agu, Journey Allen, Lisa E. Harris, Michael Khalil Taylor, Rebecca Novak, and Ifeanyi “Res” Okoro at Project Row Houses. [18]
Hunt’s activist projects have featured collaborations with Critical Resistance, [19] California Coalition of Women Prisoners, [8] Friends and Families of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children and the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, [20] the Underground Scholars, [4] and Mass Liberation Arizona. [21]
Hunt’s works have exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, [22] the Hammer Museum, [23] the Coleman Center for the Arts, [24] Documenta 12, [17] the New Museum, [25] and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. [26]
Hunt studied Studio Art and Music at U.C. Irvine [27] and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, [28] and he was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program. [29] He was faculty and co-chair of the Visual Art program at Vermont College of Fine Arts from 2008–2015, [30] and he has served as faculty in the Photo and Media Program at CalArts since 2008, where he also served as program director from 2010–2019. [5]
Ashes Ashes was commissioned for the exhibition, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, curated by Nicole Fleetwood. It is a two-channel video and accompanying publication that attempts an abolitionist imagining, asking the viewer to envision “cages as ruins,” [31] considering the scheduled closure of New York City’s Rikers Island as its starting point. Interviews with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Shana Agid, Dalaeja Foreman, Sophia Gurulé, Pilar Maschi and other members of New York’s former No New Jails Coalition, provide soundtrack to the wandering of Hunt’s camera through wild sections of the shorelines that surround Rikers, observing plants, trees, wildlife and industrial remains. These passages are interrupted by sequences with narration performed by artist, Alia Ali, over archival film and collections of stereographic photographs that capture the time of Rikers’ beginnings, addressing its namesake’s involvement in the slave trade and the island’s expansion by vast landfills of ash — burnt garbage brought from New York’s 19th century modern life, upon which the jail complex sits today. With the refrain, “When Rikers Island was covered in cages,” the jail complex is referred to entirely in the past tense. The film’s epilogue extends its questions to the effects of COVID-19 and the escalated calls for abolition that interrupted the film’s making, following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, calls that built upon the decades of activism by people like the film’s Gilmore and Agid, Angela Davis and many more. [32] Ashes Ashes “ruminate upon the 2026 scheduled end of Rikers, a non-linear mapping of the history seeped into its tainted ground so as to excavate a hope of abolition. In this way, Hunt treats as malleable the conditions of oppression that oftentimes feel permanent, and leans into a distant, yet fixed indeterminacy that promises celebratory emancipation.” [33]
Degrees of Visibility is a large body of landscape photographs made in locations throughout the fifty U.S. states and territories, documenting the spaces in which prisons, jails and detention centers are embedded. Each image is photographed from publicly accessible points of view, studying the ways prisons are presented and camouflaged within our everyday life. [8] [34] [35] Hunt’s theory is that this erasure of contributes to an aesthetics of mass incarceration, whereby the concealment of punishment relieves citizens of their responsibility to it, and is one of the things that allows the system to grow, and in a way that engages “carceral geographies.” [36] [37] [38] Hunt builds each exhibition of Degrees of Visibility in dialogue with local community organizations, which resulted in workshops, public talks, campaign events, [8] [39] [40] and a series of free newspapers that Hunt produces of their conversations. [41] This has included the organizations Critical Resistance, Project South, Southerners On New Ground, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, All of Us or None, Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), Take Back Cheapside, the Underground Scholars, has been exhibited at Wonderroot in Atlanta, [19] the Alabama Contemporary, Coleman Center for the Arts, Foto Forum Santa Fe, the Bolivar Art Gallery of the University of Kentucky, and the Eric Quezada Center for Culture and Politics, and it has been included in the exhibitions Walls Turned Sideways and Visualizing Abolition.
Notes on the Emptying of a City is a performance and book based upon Hunt’s time as part of a delegation of activists to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, calling for an investigation into the Sheriff’s refusal to evacuate the Orleans Parish Prison, the imprisoned people reported to have drown in their cells, and the reported abuses during survivors’ transfer to prisons around Louisiana. [42] [25] The performance built upon the material Hunt originally incorporated into the short video, “I Won’t Drown on that Levee and You Ain’t Gonna’ Break My Back” (2006), which was the centerpiece for the Campaign for Amnesty for Prisoners of Katrina. [43] A hybrid work that Hunt describes as “a dismantled film,” [25] [44] it combines his own live narration with video of interviews he conducted, footage of a press conference in front of the jail and a “right to return” march and protest held by community organizations and displaced survivors of the storm, while theorizing the building of racism into architecture, planning, policing, gentrification, and state responses to disasters, or disaster capitalism. [45] It includes the voices of Xochitl Bervera, Joe Cook, Althea Francois, Tamika Middleton, and Malik Rahim, from organizations including Common Ground, Critical Resistance, Friends and Families of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, Human Rights Watch, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, and American Civil Liberties Union of New Orleans. The performance was later made into a book, designed by Laura Fields, and published by Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the performance was presented at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the Philly Fringe Festival, Threewalls Gallery, Project Row Houses, Center for Contemporary Art Santa Fe, the University of Texas at El Paso, the New Museum, Woodbourne Correctional Facility (NY), Putnamville Correctional Facility (IN), and the Arika 12 Performance Festival in Glasgow.
A World Map: In Which We See... is a conceptual map and accompanying workshop that Hunt created in 2003 to understand statelessness within contemporary globalization. [11] [12] By mapping relationships between two critical discourses in the early 2000s, that of anti-globalization movement as it found its expression in the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, and the anti-prison–industrial complex movement, which revolve in part around the figures of the refugee and the prisoner. Each, according to Hunt, offered a theory of statelessness and a stateless figure, as originally theorized after World War II by theorists like Hannah Arendt. [46] Originally designed digitally, its primary exhibition form is hand-rendered onto a chalkboard or wall. To shape public dialogue on the map, Hunt developed a workshop structure that would create the map in steps with an invited group of community members, leading to a completed map, and eventually a response work that came from the participants. A World Map was included in the Atlas of Radical Cartography, [13] edited by Lize Mogel and Alexis Baghat, and was included in The Global Contemporary at ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Post-American LA at 18th Street Gallery in Los Angeles, [47] Capital it Fails Us Now at UKS in Oslo, and Patriot, at the Baltimore Contemporary.
Corrections (2001) is a feature documentary, Hunt’s first work on the prison industrial complex, distributed by Third World Newsreel. [48] [49] [50] The film features narration and interviews with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Judy Greene, Christian Parenti, Rose Braz, Ellen Reddy, Helen Reddy, Joseph Dillon Davey, Harmon Wray, David Utter, Shannon Robshaw and others, set against a prison trade show, tours of prison construction sites, visits to department of corrections offices and private prison corporate headquarters, to protests and meetings with community organizers. Together, it looks to the forces behind the massive growth of the US prison system since 1968, as the prison population hits an unprecedented 2 million in the year 2000. The film offered an significant critique of the prison industrial complex that followed the activism galvanized by the first Critical Resistance conference in Berkeley in 1998, and it was both made in dialogue with activist organizations and toured alongside campaigns as a grassroots tool. This included a national grassroots tour funded by the Public Welfare Foundation, It was an official selection in numerous film festivals, including the Slamdance Film Festival, the Atlanta Film Festival, and the Birmingham Sidewalk Film Festival, multiple museum and gallery exhibitions internationally, and is in the collection of over fifty university and public libraries. The reception of Corrections and its engagement with the anti-prison activism of the early 2000s led to its elaboration in the Corrections Documentary Project, which includes ten additional short videos, Hunt's Prison Maps poster project, and study guides based upon his research. [20] [51]
Hunt's Prison Maps are a set of two popular education posters, subtitled: "What is the Prison Industrial Complex?", and "What is the Historical Context for the Prison Industrial Complex?" Made to accompany Hunt's 2001 Corrections and incorporating the additional research that came from that project, they exist as an unlimited edition of free prints, often reprinted for exhibitions and community organizing contexts. They were the first of Hunt's projects using cartographic strategies to map discourses and concepts of contemporary politics, mass incarceration and globalization, which also include Order (For the Jena Six), A World Map: In Which We See..., As Flowers Turn Toward the Sun,
The prison-industrial complex (PIC) is a term, coined after the "military-industrial complex" of the 1950s, used by scholars and activists to describe the many relationships between institutions of imprisonment and the various businesses that benefit from them.
Sing Sing Correctional Facility, formerly Ossining Correctional Facility, is a maximum-security prison operated by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in the village of Ossining, New York, United States. It is about 30 miles (48 km) north of Midtown Manhattan on the east bank of the Hudson River. It holds about 1,700 inmates and housed the execution chamber for the State of New York until the abolition of capital punishment in New York in 1977.
Rikers Island is a 413-acre (167.14-hectare) prison island in the East River in the Bronx that contains New York City's largest jail.
The prison abolition movement is a network of groups and activists that seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation and education that do not focus on punishment and government institutionalization. The prison abolitionist movement is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is intended to improve conditions inside prisons.
Critical Resistance is a U.S. based organization with the stated goal of dismantling what it calls the prison-industrial complex (PIC). Critical Resistance's national office is in Oakland, California, with three additional chapters in New York City, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon.
The United States Penitentiary, Allenwood is a maximum security United States federal prison in Pennsylvania. It is part of the Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex and is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a division of the United States Department of Justice.
The Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center was an 800-bed jail barge used to hold inmates for the New York City Department of Corrections. The barge was anchored off the Bronx's southern shore, across from Rikers Island, near Hunts Point. It was built for $161 million at Avondale Shipyard in Louisiana, along the Mississippi River near New Orleans, and brought to New York in 1992 to reduce overcrowding in the island's land-bound buildings for a lower price. Nicknamed "The Boat" by prison staff and inmates, it was designed to handle inmates from medium- to maximum-security in 16 dormitories and 100 cells.
A prison, also known as a jail, gaol, penitentiary, detention center, correction center, correctional facility, or remand center, is a facility where people are confined against their will and denied their liberty under the authority of the state, generally as punishment for various crimes. Authorities most commonly use prisons within a criminal-justice system: people charged with crimes may be imprisoned until their trial; those who have pled or been found guilty of crimes at trial may be sentenced to a specified period of imprisonment.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people face difficulties in prison such as increased vulnerability to sexual assault, other kinds of violence, and trouble accessing necessary medical care. While much of the available data on LGBTQ inmates comes from the United States, Amnesty International maintains records of known incidents internationally in which LGBTQ prisoners and those perceived to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender have suffered torture, ill-treatment and violence at the hands of fellow inmates as well as prison officials.
Victoria Law, familiarly known as Vikki Law, is an American anarchist activist, prison abolitionist, writer, freelance editor, and photographer. Her books are Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, Don't Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements and Communities, Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, and Prisons Make Us Safer: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration (2021).
Zackary Drucker is an American multimedia artist, cultural producer, LGBT activist, actress, and television producer. She is an Emmy-nominated producer for the docu-series This Is Me, a consultant on the TV series Transparent, and is based out of Los Angeles. Drucker is an artist whose work explores themes of gender and sexuality and critiques predominant two-dimensional representations. Drucker has stated that she considers discovering, telling, and preserving trans history to be not only an artistic opportunity but a political responsibility. Drucker's work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, and film festivals including but not limited to the 2014 Whitney Biennial, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Hammer Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Tourmaline is an American artist, filmmaker, activist, editor, and writer. She is a transgender woman who identifies as queer. Tourmaline is most notable for her work in transgender activism and economic justice, through her work with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Critical Resistance and Queers for Economic Justice. She is based in New York City.
Liza Jessie Peterson is a playwright, actor, activist, and educator. She is known for her one-woman show, The Peculiar Patriot and her appearances in Ava DuVernay's film 13th.
Banu Cennetoğlu is a visual artist based in Istanbul. She uses photography, installation, and printed matter to explore the classification, appropriation and distribution of data and knowledge. Her work deals with listings, collections, rearrangements, and archives. Cennetoğlu co-represented Turkey at the 53rd International Venice Biennale with Ahmet Öğüt in 2009. Her work has been shown at numerous international institutions such as Musée cantonal des Beaux-arts, Lausanne (2022); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2020); Ständehaus, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfallen, Düsseldorf (2019); SculptureCenter, New York (2019); Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2018), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2018); documenta14, Athens and Kassel (2017); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2015); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2011); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2014), Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010); Walker Art Center (2007); Istanbul Biennial (2007); and Berlin Biennial (2003). She is the founding director of BAS (2006–ongoing), an Istanbul-based artist-run initiative that collects and displays artists’ books and printed material as artwork. In Turkey, she is "best known as an apostle of the artist’s book."
Carolyn Baxter is an African-American poet, playwright, and musician. Baxter is from Harlem, New York. She was a participant in the Black Panthers School Breakfast Program. Baxter was formerly incarcerated at the New York City Correctional Institute for Women at Rikers Island. Her writings are considered a part of the Prison Art's Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Maria Gaspar is an American interdisciplinary artist and educator.
Che Gossett is a trans femme writer, scholar, and archivist. They have written extensively on black and trans visibility, black trans aesthetics, racial capitalism, and queer, trans and black radicalism, resistance and abolition.
Black August is an annual commemoration and prison-based holiday to remember Black political prisoners, Black freedom struggles in the United States and beyond, and to highlight Black resistance against racial, colonial and imperialist oppression. It takes place during the entire calendar month of August.
Nicole R. Fleetwood is an American academic, curator, police abolitionist, prison abolitionist, and author. She is the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, Fleetwood was Professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University.
Bryonn Bain is an American poet, actor, prison activist, scholar, author, hip hop artist and professor of African American Studies and World Arts & Cultures in the School of the Arts and the School of Law at the University of California at Los Angeles.
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