This project chronicles collaborative photographs created during a six-month-long correspondence with Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project University Without Walls degree students and alumni at Stateville prison. Together, we considered the value and possibilities of photography as a tool of agency over one’s own image.
PNAP and Love & Protect collaborated to put on an outdoor artmaking and quilting event hosted at the Haymarket House on July 13th. Community members joined together in building a communal seed quilt to be installed outside of Logan Correctional Center. The event featured sashiko embroidery, papermaking, sewing seeds, and message writing on the quilt.
This portrait project began in May of 2021, when PNAP staff member and SAIC art history professor, Jason LaFountain, invited SAIC students, Ruth Poor and Helen Sanchez-Cortes, to create painted portraits of our current UWW degree students at Stateville prison. It is the first of a series of special projects Jason will organize as part of his work at PNAP.
We teamed up with the DuSable Museum of African American History to paint new community murals designed by artists at Stateville, including former students of the legendary Dr. Margaret Burroughs.
As a tool to discuss the limits and ideals of human rights within a carceral state, artists at Stateville Prison, who struggle daily for their own human rights, created block prints of each article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The 51st (Free) State is a body of work that includes emblems, songs, choreography, graphic narratives, and stage sets to connect thousands of people incarcerated across the nation through a spatio-political imaginary.
A series of thematic works addressing long-term sentencing policies and the other long terms they produce.
This project examines the “citizen” as a socio-political framework that functions to both grant rights and exclude them.
It’s Now is a public mural project designed by artists at Stateville with artist Aaron Hughes and painted by community members.
Letters from the Future was a project developed in 2016 that asked incarcerated artists to imagine life in 2045.