I’m sure there are people who have historicized this moment, but that's an interesting paradox when these practices get historicized and codified. It's a tricky balance between the need to write and be part of creating critical discourse around these practices, and yet there's also that danger of things becoming domesticated—made safer somehow.
Mary Patten is a visual artist, video maker, writer, educator, and a long-time political activist, with commitments to movements for racial justice, for international anti-imperialist solidarity, against the carceral state, and for queer and LGBT liberation.
Her video installations, drawings, moving-image and mixed media works have been shown in alternative spaces, university museums, international film and video festivals, queer venues, and spaces that support experimental and politically charged work. Mary says, “I have been nourished by many different kinds of art, cinema, and writing to ‘make art politically,’ and to explore new sensorial and affective worlds. I embrace collisions and alignments between ‘politics’ and art, fully aware that there are no wholly original ideas, that we are all shifting composites of one another.”
For years, she has led or participated in many public collaborations and actions—murals, billboards, large-scale interdisciplinary projects, and public memorials—including Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, ACT UP Chicago, the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, and Feel Tank Chicago. She continues to be drawn to collective forms of cultural production to reclaim language, feeling, and political passions from fundamentalist thinking, and to reclaim a utopia of the everyday—a way of being together in the world that allows for anger, joy, and reparative visions. Sometimes working collaboratively means slipping under the radar, but that’s a risk worth taking.
Ashley Hunt is an artist, writer, and educator whose documentary and community-engaged artworks of the past two and a half decades have focused primarily on the United States prison system—its growth, ecologies, effects on communities, continuation of the country’s genocidal histories, and its abolition. A recent fellow of the Art for Justice Fund, his works have included short and feature-length documentaries, video installations, maps, performances, photography, and an experimental dance school, alongside collaborations with community organizations including Critical Resistance, the Underground Scholars, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Release Aging People in Prison, Southerners on New Ground, Project South, Citizens for Quality Education, the Youth Justice Coalition, Mass Liberation Arizona, and Friends and Family of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children.
He recently exhibited his ten-year photographic study of carceral landscapes, Degrees of Visibility (2010–20), within the Visualizing Abolition series at UC Santa Cruz’s Institute for Arts and Sciences, and his photography and writing series tracing prison histories through architecture, Hostile Territory (2016–23) for the 2023 Burren Annual, of Burren College in Ireland. His film cycle on the closing of prisons, ruins, and imaginaries includes Ashes Ashes (2020), commissioned for Nicole Fleetwood’s exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration; Double Time (2021); and a forthcoming film on the repurposing of closed prisons across the US as a meditation on historical and political grief.