Byline: Jennie E. Park

When Audrey Chan began at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California in October 2019 as their inaugural Artist in Residence, she and the flagship ACLU affiliate had envisioned the creation of a mural commemorating their centennial on their Los Angeles office building. “The initial mural proposal, based on archival research into the affiliate’s history since 1923, was still in an exploratory phase when I shifted to working on other campaign materials and projects with the [ACLU SoCal] Communications team,” Chan wrote via email.

When disproportionately burdensome effects of COVID-19 on marginalized communities collided with global uprisings against anti-Black police brutality during the summer, discussions on activating the front façade of the building, located at the corner of W. 8^th St. and Columbia Ave. in Westlake, were renewed with urgency. “The mural conversation became a priority in June, when [People’s Budget LA Coalition] organizers identified the ACLU SoCal’s facade as a site for an art action [since it is] directly across the street from the LA Police Protective League’s headquarters,” Chan disclosed.

The People’s Budget LA Coalition, led by Black Lives Matter Los Angeles (BLMLA), has organized for the last five years to redirect funding allocated to the police toward community-based services that would support rather than criminalize individuals, especially those disproportionately likely to be incarcerated. At a People’s Budget LA Coalition meeting last summer, ACLU SoCal’s Policy Counsel and Senior Organizer, Andrés Kwon, strategized with Coalition members—namely, People’s City Council LA, TransLatin@ Coalition, Ktown for All and BLMLA—about building on the momentum of civic protests to heighten focus on the LA Police Protective League’s culture of impunity. “Andrés talked with the organizers about stag[ing] an action in the form of a mural,” Chan wrote. “He brought the idea to Marcus Benigno (Chief Communications Officer & Marketing Officer, ACLU SoCal), who then proposed it to me.”

In discussions spanning several weeks, Chan, the ACLU SoCal, BLMLA, People’s City Council Los Angeles, TransLatin@ Coalition and Ktown for All decided to include in the mural twenty individuals whose community-based work or personal stories amplify the mission of the People’s Budget LA Coalition, as well as the intersectional advocacy efforts of the ACLU SoCal. “Several of the key people from the original [mural] proposal and current community partners were incorporated into the final design to link the present moment to the [ACLU SoCal’s] work on an intersectional range of issues, including criminal justice and police practices, economic justice and housing, immigrants’ rights, First Amendment [rights], LGBTQ rights, and students’ rights,” Chan explained. “This approach positioned the mural to speak to this moment, the past, and the hope for a better tomorrow.”

Titled by Chan, The Care We Create, the mural features Black Lives Matter activists Dr. Melina Abdulla, Patrisse Kahn-Cullors and Janaya Future Kahn, Theo Henderson (producer of the podcast We the Unhoused), criminal justice and police reform activists Baba Akili, Albert Corado, Mark-Anthony Johnson, Phal Sok and Theresa Smith (featured with her late son Caesar Cruz, who was killed by Anaheim police officers), Vonya Quarles (co-founder and head of Starting Over, Inc., a nonprofit providing transitional housing, health and other vital services to people without homes or coming out of incarceration), ACLU SoCal clients José Bello and Ali Vayeghan, who were detained or deported by ICE, LA-based artist Marjan Vayghan (alongside her uncle Vayeghan), activist for deported veterans Hector Barajas, transgender Latina activist Bamby Salcedo, ACLU SoCal Youth Liberty Squad members Alysha Boone and Anthony Flores-Alvarez, Ramona Ripston (ACLU SoCal Executive Director from 1972-2011), and Upton Sinclair, who helped found the ACLU SoCal a century ago.

Alongside some of the mural subjects appear quotes, including one attributed to the late Ramona Ripston, who made economic justice a central issue during her tenure as ACLU SoCal Executive Director: “If you don’t have food on the table or a bed to sleep in, the promises of equity and justice are just illusions.”

United in their commitment to the intersecting needs enumerated in bold vinyl lettering above the building’s entrance, the towering individuals across the 5,500-square-foot mural gaze with unwavering resolve at the LA Police Protective League’s headquarters, as well as all passersby. At once confronting, assured, inviting and uplifting, their gazes ask, “Will we dare to work together to imagine and build structures that ensure enduring support, access and justice for all?” In alliance with their efforts is the mural’s natural scenery, also rooted in Southern California. “The park background is inspired by Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Center, and the mural subjects are surrounded by healing plants native to the region,” Chan stated.

Completed on December 23, 2020, the mural was painted “every night for three weeks” after the design was transferred onto the building through a pounce paper process, Chan relayed. “I recommended we work with Eder Cetina, CEO and Creative Director of Wilson Cetina Group; a recent project [of his] is Barbara Kruger’s mural Untitled (Questions) at MOCA Geffen,” Chan continued. “He is also part of LA Art Collective, who he enlists for painting projects, as many of the collective members are muralists and street artists.” Fabricators of The Care We Create alongside Cetina included Juan “Gogo” Hernandez, David “Dense” Zajdman, Keefer “Keef” Butterworth, Fernando Mendoza, Dan Boer, and Frank “Kodak” Armstead of the LA Art Collective & Wilson Cetina Group. Ana Iwataki served as an art consultant for the ACLU SoCal on the mural and throughout Chan’s residency.

Location: 1313 W. 8^th St., Los Angeles, CA 90017

Mural website: https://www.aclusocal.org/care-we-create

In ever-mounting reports on the interlocked pandemics of COVID-19 and structural oppression, two words cyclically resound: “vulnerable” and “resist.” While the virus causes us to consider our own immune system’s vulnerability or resistance to it, it also creates or reveals metaphors for how we consider populations or political positions and actions. The immunization-related meaning of “resist” informs its political applications. Our view of “vulnerable” populations as inherently diseased became salient; because we have already socially distanced ourselves from the imprisoned, unhoused, migrants or refugees, elderly, and other “others” by placing them at society’s fringes, they are unable to practice social distancing among themselves. “Vulnerable,” while reorienting our awareness toward those neglected, can also be flattening.

­­When COVID-19-related closures began happening in February and March of this year, Los Angeles-based artists whose practices involve populations deemed vulnerable, or actions and expressions of political resistance, were in the midst of a range of projects. Kim Abeles, gloria galvez, Ara Oshagan, John Malpede and Henriëtte Brouwers, Cole M. James, Johanna Hedva and Audrey Chan reflected on vulnerability and resistance in light of the intersection of the pandemics and their art practices, life experiences and activism; they suggest interpretations and practices of, or alternatives to, vulnerability and resistance that help orient us toward an imaginative and mutually celebrated new normal.

When closures began, community-based artist Kim Abeles had been working on a Los Angeles County Arts and Culture commission to create six large seed sculptures to line thirteen miles of interconnected trails (densely traveled before safer-at-home mandates) between Baldwin Hills and Playa del Rey. The seeds, cracked open, would reveal imagery alluding to the idea of journeys, now seemingly referenced and interrupted by the protracted detour presented by the pandemic.

When asked about vulnerability, she mentioned another artwork she had recently installed outdoors that disappeared after one day. Responding to Durden and Ray’s call to 100 artists in May to mount pieces outdoors to inspire Angelenos during the pandemic, she opted to make a cover for a public bus bench in Pasadena. She photographed pinecones and pine needles at the Institute of Forest Genetics during her residency there, and then, she explained, “made [the photographs] into fabric, and stitched and padded it so that if somebody sat on it, it was soft; I did a lot of handwork.”

Abeles, who has created work for over forty years alongside survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, incarcerated female firefighters, and on linked challenges facing unhoused people and the environment in Southern California, was clear in not placing the disappearance of her artwork and the challenges faced by the populations with whom she has worked within the same discussion of vulnerability. Nonetheless, she noted, “Putting art out there is a vulnerable state—most people put these artworks on their house or a business, maybe they knew the people, so most of the stuff was pretty protected. But [the cover] lasted a day. I saw the theft of this thing as metaphoric for what we’re all going through about this idea of loss, and what is value.”

“I see the value of people right now,” she continued, “and I also am very disappointed when I see news about people ridiculing or hurting or killing others—it’s hard to see how both of those things simultaneously go on in life. Vulnerability has to be in that place between those two things. Because of the way society makes structures for itself, we don’t give much space to things that aren’t like us, whoever that ‘us’ is. I think you have to take the stance of vulnerability these days, because you’re rewarded not to be that way.”

On the collision of COVID-19 and structural inequities, Abeles noted, “I think we’re at a spiritual crisis—it’s like when you’re an alcoholic, you’ve got to reach that rock bottom or you just don’t understand what needs to change. This coronavirus gave you plenty of social critique to look at—racism, homelessness, domestic violence, problems with the school system—it has exposed all of those more effectively than I could’ve ever done [through art]. There’s no turning back now. I keep trying to embrace work that has more of a solution base.”

Community organizer and artist gloria galvez concurred that vulnerability is a stance that is easier to elect from a position of safety or privilege. “If my safety isn’t guaranteed, and I constantly feel ‘less than,’ there’s no room for vulnerability within that space,” she said. “If my vulnerability is being honored and people are reciprocal to it, it can be a moment of transformation.”

Before the closures in March, galvez had been developing a curriculum with FREE LA (“Fight for the Revolution that will Educate and Empower Los Angeles”) High School in South LA; the school was founded by Youth Justice Coalition (YJC), an organization that addresses incarceration and criminalization issues affecting youth of color and low-income youth. The curriculum, she explained, explores “object-oriented ontology, vibrant matter and animism as they relate to the youths’ day-to-day inner city experiences and their political ecological surroundings and organizing campaigns—a lot of the youth in this school are organizers.” Due to its need for students to be present in the same environment to explore and work with their surroundings, the curriculum has been postponed.

Much of galvez’s artwork stems from her organizing efforts around replacing prison and criminalization systems with community-generated redefinitions of safety and accountability, including transformative justice approaches that acknowledge the ecosystem wherein harms are perpetuated between individuals. “Vulnerability reminds me of transformative justice,” she reflected. “You think of the vulnerability of the person harm[ed]—that person has to be willing to engage with the person who did harm [and] talk about what happened, and figure out how that harm can be repaired or transformed to a more positive situation. The person who created the harm also has to be vulnerable; they have to acknowledge the harm they created, and how they’re going to address the harm.”

“I see defensiveness on the opposite side of vulnerability,” she continued. “Policing and criminalization acts from this defensive place, where we’re overfunding police stations. The YJC is starting an alternative 911; they’re recruiting and training people to go out and do harm reduction and conflict resolution. That’s an empowering but also vulnerable position—things can go wrong. But we’re saying we have each other’s backs and we’ll figure it out; we’re always going to think critically and in a way that addresses and gives dignity to all participating parties. We’re willing to take the risk—instead of calling the cops, I’m going to talk to you, and we’re going to create a culture of going that extra mile.”

While “normal” and “surreal,” for many, refer respectively to conditions before and after closures began, activists like galvez have witnessed their underadopted, community-specific daily practices and concerns suddenly become the new wider-scale “normal.” “I work with this community group called Mutual Aid Action Los Angeles,” she explained, “and this group was already talking about, ‘How can we build autonomous communities [with] a culture of mutual aid, outside of systems that are dehumanizing people?’”

“The surrealness aspect of [the pandemic] is,” she continued, “all of a sudden all of these mutual aid groups popped up. Prior to this pandemic, not everybody was trying to practice mutual aid, or at least didn’t use that term. It was exciting and inspiring to see all of these efforts and political inclination, but there were moments where I was distrustful—you’re here now, will you be here tomorrow, the day after tomorrow? Because this work is long term work.”

Her view on the relationship between vulnerability and resistance underscores her activist orientation. “Vulnerability and resistance are tools in my toolset for liberation,” she remarked. Having taught a class at CalArts last year on the relationship between art and political resistance, galvez considers resistance as “more than a tool, it’s also a movement. It’s a state of consciousness.” This consciousness extends, for her, to solidarity with plants as essential allies and mediums in dismantling capitalism. Before the closure, she had been working on a film titled green revolution that references plant-based survivalist strategies now unexpectedly relevant to weathering pandemics.

“Just because I’m making space for vulnerability, I’m not going to let go of resisting,” she stated. “We’ve got to be vigilant and make sure the ‘-isms’ aren’t crawling in—to me, it’s really hard to separate racism from capitalism and sexism. A lot of my friends right now, when we write emails, have been writing, ‘stay fierce,’ ‘stay dangerous,’ because that is so important. I can practice vulnerability with a balance of staying dangerous to the systems of oppression—that’s what I’m personally trying to practice.”

Artist and ReflectSpace Gallery curator Ara Oshagan also views vulnerability and resistance as complementary tools, especially within the context of exploring and maintaining personal identity, as much of his work centers on geographic boundary-crossing bodies. At the time of the closures, Oshagan had been preparing for shows along Korea’s Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), in Armenia, and in Los Angeles’ Grant Park on the subjects of borders, diasporic identities and Korean comfort women. (All shows have been postponed due to COVID-19.)

“I think of vulnerability in a personal sense, in terms of space in which you can find empathy, connectivity, [and] you’re open to the world,” he said. “When I think about vulnerability and resistance, they are closely related in a process of trying to understand your life, to unravel who you are. What is your narrative, and has it become part of the general narrative? [For] Armenians, the answer is, ‘No.’ I need to resist the erasure of my own narrative and place it into the conversation as much as I can. And to do that, I need to be vulnerable, open, have my antennas out in the world and be able to be influenced and influence at the same time. So, I think [vulnerability and resistance] go hand-in-hand.”

While Oshagan’s artwork involves populations among or situated similarly to those considered most vulnerable to COVID-19 due to political oppression or marginalization, Oshagan refuses to view them as victims. “I never think of the populations I work with as vulnerable, because I work with them today,” he remarked. “Back in the nineties, my friend Levon Parian and I started taking portraits of Armenian genocide survivors. There are some portraits that depict survivors as being weak. We have been against those kinds of images. I wanted to show resilience—the ones looking you straight in the eye, saying, ‘I survived.’ ‘Survivre’ is French; ‘sur’ is above, ‘vivre’ is to live, so they were able to ‘live above’ the death around them. I’m much more interested in those images of resistance.”

“Same with the images I have of comfort women,” he continued. “I always think of them as resistance and resilience in the face of unimaginable odds. Historically, they would be vulnerable because of colonization [by] Japan, but my approach to them is never, ever to consider them vulnerable now, not to show them in that light.”

This resilience, he feels, characterizes immigrant communities in general, and notably his community of Armenians in Glendale who were not as disoriented by the COVID-19 pandemic as others unaccustomed to recurring adversity. “I’m Armenian but was born in Beirut,” he related. “We fled the war and I came [to the U.S.].”

“In Armenian society,” he continued, “when somebody asks how you are, the answer is literally, ‘Nothing.’ It’s open for interpretation—my interpretation is that because of the constant upheaval, displacement, war and attrition in Armenian history for 1,500 years, ‘nothing’ is really short for, ‘nothing bad has happened to me today.’ You’re always ready that something is going to disrupt your life.”

The pandemic, he said, was “taken very much in stride; the Armenian community in general didn’t get very panicked. Armenian stores, the micro-economy we have in Glendale, they were fine—you could buy whatever you wanted, throughout the time people were fighting over toilet paper. So, there’s this attitude that that kind of history and immigrant experience brings, where you know trouble is right around the corner, and there it is, so you deal with it.”

Los Angeles Poverty Department’s founding Artistic Director John Malpede and Associate Director Henriëtte Brouwers also champion the resilience of the Skid Row community with whom they have worked for decades. “Resilience is the word that’s been used about Skid Row for years and years and years and years,” Malpede commented. “They had to be resilient, because they had been abandoned in so many ways. If it weren’t for resistance, standing up for the community, it would’ve been displaced. It’s in the center of LA and there’s so much money to be made by displacing it.”

He continued, “We have friends we’ve worked with [in Skid Row] that have been in the same hotel for twenty-five years. Over sixty percent of the population is permanent. [In] a few of the programs where people are transitioning out of state prison or drug recovery programs or domestic abuse [there are] about 3,000 people. Maybe 8,000 people in the hotels.”

Brouwers noted that while people in Skid Row are labeled “vulnerable,” “outcast,” “criminals” and “drug addicts,” Skid Row is “the only community where people know and support each other, and are resilient and very creative. It’s the only community where you walk down the street and everybody says ‘hi’ and hugs.”

Skid Row’s resilience was acutely tested during the pandemic. Malpede noted, “The Catholic Worker that has continued to feed people [in Skid Row] since the seventies, a lot of their volunteers are older, so those people weren’t coming.”

Brouwers added, “The missions that used to provide lunch and dinner started to only do takeout lunch bags. Then the Union Rescue Mission just brought everybody inside; at a certain moment somebody brought COVID-19 from outside, and all of a sudden there were seventy people infected. There are 1,000 people using fifteen bathrooms a day; on the borders of Skid Row like on Main Street, a few of those were set on fire by people that live on Main Street because they don’t want toilets for homeless people that live on their front door. There were no places to wash your hands or even have water; it was completely overwhelming. Finally, a judge said handwash stations that were promised had to be implemented, but that was weeks after the first alerts and shutdowns happened.”

“‘Helpless’ doesn’t necessarily refer to the person [in Skid Row],” Malpede opined. “If the people that are authorized to do stuff don’t do it—they abandon you and their responsibilities—who’s helpless? The people [in Skid Row] aren’t helpless, they’ve done everything they can possibly do. What’s been revealed as ‘normal’ in the U.S. is what a lack of resilience there is in the systems we have, because everything has been stripped to provide maximum current profit.”

Brouwers agreed. “The way the system is built up in America is completely vulnerable,” she lamented. “Once people don’t have work for one month, they are already out on the street, and they can’t go to the hospital and pay their bills. That’s vulnerability—there’s no social safety net.”

Los Angeles Poverty Department had held public talks around and opened their show, How to House 7,000 People in Skid Row, at the Skid Row History Museum and Archive just days before March shutdowns began. Brouwers explained, “We’d been working on that project for the last five years with other grassroots organizations to create our own community plan, Skid Row Now and 2040, because there’s a plan, DTLA 2040, which is part of the rezoning and recoding of all of Los Angeles. So, we started a coalition because we don’t want our people to be displaced.”

Malpede elaborated, “In the seventies, [the City of Los Angeles] created a fifty-block area for no market-rate housing. In 2003, there was a community plan that allowed market rate housing to be built between Main Street and the west side of San Pedro Street. In this current plan, they wanted to make all of Skid Row open up to market rate housing. Through our conversations with [the Department of City Planning], now still all of it is market rate, but ‘forty percent of that we’ll save for affordable housing, but we want the boundaries to remain the same.’ So that’s what’s going on.”

“So, we created that ‘zone’ with the Department, and the exhibition looks at all the other ways you can generate money or zoning to create affordable housing that is so needed,” Brouwers added. “This exhibition really zoomed in on the numbers; funding mechanisms don’t exist in the city of Los Angeles because there’s no public housing anymore—everything is linked to developers.”

Otis faculty member and community-based artist Cole M. James also prefers to cast “vulnerable” populations in a different light. When the closures occurred, they had been working with the Liberated Arts Collective, which was formed through the Youth Justice Coalition with a focus on formerly incarcerated people in transitional housing, and preparing for shows at the Vincent Price Museum and California Lutheran University. “Since we can’t start on my solo show at the William Roland Gallery at Cal Lutheran,” they explained, “I did a talk with Robin Holder, ‘Can We Talk About This: On Race and Culture [in This Cultural Moment].’ I appreciate that people I had already set up an established work with wanted to talk about what was current.”

“On the news, when they say ‘vulnerable,’” they continued, “what if we just replaced that with ‘oppressed?’ These populations are not vulnerable, they’re actively being oppressed. I’m not radical and angry and frustrated about it—I just want people to call it what it is.”

With respect to vulnerability practiced by individuals, James reflected, “Part of the great amount of strength that I have inside me is because I’m always pretty vulnerable—I’m strong but I’m not hard. I don’t view vulnerability as a weakness; I get closer to people in that way.” This receptivity extends for James to a spiritual plane. “I felt like I was preparing for this [COVID-19 pandemic] before this happened,” they said. “I was making connections to and buying things I felt like I would need [in quarantine]. I had collected all of this watercolor paper for some reason. I bought this book about color and tarot, and there are these things called veves in voodoo, they’re like drawn spells. So, I started drawing and painting these spells, and it became part of the publication East of Borneo.”

With respect to resistance, they take a stronger stance. “Every day, I have to resist the urge to believe what is said about me throughout the world. People of color are resilient by nature, because we’ve had to be to fight white supremacy in every arena and aspect of our lives,” they remarked. “Resisting in regard to protests and government activity—there is nothing to ‘resist,’ we just have to shut it down. ‘Resistance’ is almost like saying, ‘I denounce that’—you’re really not doing anything about it. If you say, ‘We will not tolerate,’ that implies action. ‘Resistance’ is, you’re still tolerating a certain amount of tension that you’re pushing back against. I don’t want people to push back. I want people to shut it down.”

Rather than push back as an outsider, James is invigorated by the possibilities of transforming institutions from within. “Since I’m the only self-identified Black full-time studio faculty doing what I do at Otis,” they said, “I’m on every diversity inclusion space, and right now all of those committees are on fire. I don’t for a second want to be assimilated, so it’s really important that I keep that transgressive practice of being inside institutions and transgressing while in them, especially institutions rooted in what they would consider diversity of thought. It’s like, can you actually be held accountable for that? Otis is doing some really good things—they’re making decisions that hopefully will keep us afloat, as well as doing the best they can to promote equity.”

On the intersection of activism and acting as an artist more broadly, James remarked, “If you’re an artist, I wonder if everyone’s thinking about the most effective way to impact change. Artists have to be held accountable for who and what they are. One of my decisions to move to Inglewood is so that I could work in a Black space, and be surrounded by Black businesses and people, because I know there’s an entire wave of people moving to Inglewood that are not Black. I need to make myself seen and take up space, and invite other people like me to come take up space.”

On the current uprisings against racism and police violence in particular, James reflected, “No one would question whether there is generational trauma with Holocaust survivors and their families, but the expectation is that Black people, after 400 years of continual systemic oppression from the government of the United States, have no generational trauma.” Pointing to our ongoing reliance on digital screens while indoors, they further noted, “There’s a truth about the Civil Rights Movement—the reason it happened was because of television. And the protest against Vietnam happened because of television. So, it’s reasonable to say that because people are at home looking at screens all day, every day, they are seeing things they might not see at a pace they are probably not used to. So [today’s uprisings are] traveling the trajectory [of] previous movements.”

For James, the safer-at-home mandates provided a welcome respite. “I was so tired,” they sighed. “Not because of the good stuff, like artmaking and shows—I got so tired of the constant, daily, emboldened racism I was experiencing. It would be when I’m walking down the street, when I go to a bar, when I sit down at a restaurant, all the time. I made a whole video called Manchego about what it’s like to move through the emotional labor of making decisions as a Black person.”

“I’m still tired of watching police officers do what they do,” they continued. “So, when we were asked to just shut down and stay inside, that wasn’t a problem for me. To identify as queer, to appear woman, but identify as nonbinary, it’s just a lot. So, it was a welcome break, because I was flat out tired.”

Author of essays Sick Woman Theory (2016) and Get Well Soon! (2020), the latter responding to COVID-19, artist and performer Johanna Hedva prefers to nix “vulnerability” and “resistance” altogether. Hedva, while Los-Angeles based, is immunocompromised and currently living in Berlin due to the exorbitant cost of US health care. “I don’t like the word vulnerability, I feel it’s been coopted by middle-class white women, cis women,” they remarked. “I think I prefer ‘permeability,’ to describe how the body is interdependent and formed; what illness reveals is how deeply dependent we are.”

“One of the myths of capitalism, of white supremacy, of a certain ideology that’s everywhere,” they continued, “is a very ableist one in that it insists we’re individually sovereign, and it’s only in this state of exception and rare and temporary where you’re going to need help. But then, you’re in debt to those who gave you help. There’s a binary between give and take when it comes to care, and that’s total bullshit. To get into and unpack that is to really understand how we think of debt in our capitalist society.”

In their work, Hedva challenges binaries and hierarchies of ability and disability, and illness and wellness.

In Get Well Soon!, Hedva illuminates how the interminable “stuckness” induced by illness, signaling the need to put care before other action, might parallel and guide the trajectory of social revolutions. In their essay, they write:

[I]llness and revolution both exist in similar kinds of time, the kind that feels crushingly present…. In revolution…time froths around the fact that the time is now…. The promise of change, the zeal for a new tomorrow….

At some point, though, the revolutionary now shifts toward the now of illness…waiting for change to come, waiting, still, waiting. Conversely, as many chronically ill and disabled folks know, the now of illness…reveals its subversive power, and produces a politic. 

We tend to place…illness…on the end of inaction, passivity, and surrender, while revolution is on the end of movement, surging and agitating. But maybe this spectrum is more like an ouroboros: one end feeding the other, transforming into, because of, made of the same stuff as the other….

Now might be a good time to rethink what a revolution can look like. Perhaps it doesn’t look like a march of angry, abled bodies in the streets. Perhaps it looks something more like the world standing still because all the bodies in it are exhausted—because care has to be prioritized before it’s too late.

Hedva noted, “In the last several years, I’ve been committed to doing accessibility in my art practice as well as my day job. If a museum or gallery contacts me to do a performance or an exhibition, I send them my disability access rider first and say, ‘Please tell me how you can or cannot support each thing. And if you cannot support it, that’s okay, I want to have a conversation about it.’”

Like galvez, Hedva noticed their typically marginalized “normal” swell during the COVID-19 pandemic. “The mutual aid that I saw emerge in communities that are normally staunchly autonomous was like seeing a weird mirror,” they observed. “[The pandemic] was an experience of watching the daily concerns that affect me and my fellow disabled friends scale up dramatically to affect the whole world in a way that the world is not used to. One phrase I’ve been using to describe it is the ‘blast radius of disability,’ which is explosive, it radically changes your perception of who you are and how the world works.”

When asked about the parallel pandemic of racism, particularly anti-Black racism within Asian American communities, heightened by the conspicuousness of an officer of Asian descent standing by in the killing of George Floyd, Hedva reflected, “I think the issue around anti-Blackness within Asian American communities and generally non-Black people of color is a serious and gravely under-addressed issue. It’s not just white supremacy, it’s also anti-Blackness, and I think the relationship of those two cannot be separated. As a Korean American person who is incredibly white-passing, I notice how whiteness and white supremacy and anti-Blackness are kind of infested in me. ‘Infestation’ gets at the horror and the violence and the uncanny, spooky quality of how these ideologies get into you on a cellular level. It’s not just some position that you think, it is embodied.”

Finally, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California’s inaugural Artist-in-Residence Audrey Chan also responded personally on the convergence of anti-Asian racism stemming from the attribution of COVID-19 to China, and anti-Black racism. “Race is woven into the everyday life of my family because my husband and I are raising a Chinese-Jamaican son in an America entrenched in the culture of white supremacy and erasure,” she wrote via email. “Our daily conversations are deeply grounding and the lens through which we are processing both the pandemic and the powerful civil uprising for Black lives. We’re doing our best to raise our son, supporting community-based organizing, and staying focused on our writing and art projects that focus on uplifting the narratives of underrepresented communities. Storytelling is our way of moving and making through this time. Solidarity is our everything and will continue to be in the days to come.”

She named several Asian American artists whose responses to the pandemic have countered the narrative of disease bearers or culprits, including “Devon Tsuno, who has converted his painting studio into a 3D-printing PPE-production factory as part of the global movement of makers supporting frontline workers; Kristina Wong, who recently premiered her phenomenal and complex one-woman show ‘Kristina Wong for Public Office’ and is now leading the Auntie Sewing Squad, a coalition of volunteers that has produced tens of thousands of fabric face masks for vulnerable communities; Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps, who makes stunning infographic drawings to visualize the strategic conversations of progressive organizers; and Amy Uyematsu, whose 1969 essay ‘The Emergence of Yellow Power in America’ continues to be a guiding light and whose poetry is unflinching in how it responds to the times.”

Chan related that, since her residency began last October, she and ACLU SoCal have “been working together to find ways for art to amplify the organization’s ongoing fight for structural change, which is in high gear on all fronts at this moment.”

“The question of vulnerability,” she reflected, “is intertwined with the question of: who is protected, what systems and structures exist to allocate or withhold protection, and who maintains or challenges those systems and structures? On the one hand, all people are (or should be) practicing hypervigilance to avoid the invisible contagion of COVID-19. On the other hand, people from marginalized communities also have had to internalize a level of hypervigilance as part of daily life to move through spaces that are overpoliced by both law enforcement and so-called ordinary citizens.”

“The residency has been an opportunity to learn that the most pervasive threats to the American democracy come from within—police violence and impunity, racist immigration policies, exploitative systems of labor, legalized discrimination, and a lack of basic protections like shelter and safety,” she continued. “I have learned that resistance and resilience are values that come from within communities who deeply understand their own needs but who don’t have the support, protection, and generations of accumulated wealth to realize the standards of well-being they deserve. I think it’s imperative for artists to be engaged in these processes of demanding accountability, tugging at and unraveling hardened positions, and activating all of our senses and faculties in the head and heart work of social change.”

When the shutdowns began, Kim Abeles had also been working on a smog-related project, stemming from her decades-long work utilizing Southern California smog as a medium for illustrating the causal chain between human activity and environmental degradation. She initially intended to place her 15’ x 5’ version of Smog Catcher—an illustration of herself holding up her skirt to catch the falling sky—outside Keystone Art Space’s entrance in downtown LA, but dismantled and placed it in her studio there when the building closed. While the names of some of her prior pieces reflect the number of days they were left outdoors to collect smog, Abeles updated the name of this piece to include the number of days it was quarantined. (In retrospect, she mused, she could have left it outside, to capture evidence of improved air quality while fewer cars were on the roads.)

Smog Catcher perhaps reflects the lenticular nature of the relationship between vulnerability and resistance: the girl holds out her skirt to catch the falling sky, anticipating a kind of peril that is toxic yet self-created (or, what she herself is made of); she stands with a readiness to meet it that is at once receptive and defensive. Quarantined, while less imperiled by indoor smog, she is quite literally broken down; the shelter at once protects and confines or cages her. Through Brouwers and Malpede, Oshagan, James and Chan, we witness another lenticular alternation: marginalized populations are from one angle vulnerable, and resiliently resist oppression from another.

The pandemic disorients us within this kaleidoscopic matrix or pulley system of harms and salves, allies and foes, and causes and effects. We thought we were helping the environment with reusable bags, but we are now prohibited from bringing them into stores to protect our own health; to protect our own health, we now also view disposable masks and gloves, and ecosystem-destroying chemical sanitizers, as “essential.” We had been admonished against too much screen time at the expense of physical interaction, and now that advice has flipped. Pharmaceutical companies condemned for catalyzing opioid addiction stand to become heroes through distributing COVID-19 vaccines, while sizable contingents of opposing political parties have emerged from their respective echo chambers in a rare show of solidarity to oppose all vaccinations.

We understand that social distancing is vital to curbing the spread of COVID-19, but hundreds have protested with locked arms in public, for days on end, perhaps because the risks posed by systemic racism are in some ways more life-threatening than, or exacerbate, the risks posed by COVID-19. Many of these protestors condemned others who congregated sans masks to demand that states reopen. Before COVID-19 became a global pandemic, the prison industrial complex was already considered one, but those who stand for abolition on one hand might, on another, demand the imprisonment of particular wrongdoers, e.g., the police and other state actors. It’s hard to whack all the moles or societal demons at once and for good; knocking one down seems only to thrust the next upward. Vilifying something absolutely, on its face, either ignores its vital function in another context, or ends up most harshly stinging the accuser.

What the pandemics and their series of “Sophie’s choices” bring into relief is the inherently exploitative and violent infrastructure we have created to support what we consider meaningful human activities. If we had set up a world where we each, say, found in nature all the food we ate, we would not have to choose between disposable or reusable bags at grocery stores. If we had set up a world without systemic oppression, we would not have to choose between public demonstration, imprisonment and social distancing. It may be naïve to romanticize and return to a time predating “civilization” or industry; but, acknowledging our antagonistic infrastructure—where exploitative competition between individuals’ desires, and between human desires and nature, is the premise—might help us lay groundwork for a more equitable ecosystem or “normal” ahead, where we don’t need entrenched winners or losers in order to meaningfully live.

When we consider “vulnerability” and “resistance” as gateways or pointers to more expansive or potential-rich energetic fields, rather than words or parcels of property over which ownership is volleyed and won or lost, they converge on what feels like the choice and process of a third term: engagement. Engagement entails marriage, wrestling, or often both. Engaged, whether in love or battle, each participant is engrossed in the other’s energy, or fully exposed to and present with the other.

When vulnerability and resistance meet in engagement, they yield, not unperturbed union or cancel culture warfare, but sustained responsiveness grounded in heightened awareness. When we engage, we go beyond reactivity; we bring our whole selves and energy to meet our match (in battle or love), whom we fundamentally respect as our equal. While idealizing this kind of engagement might create anxiety around doing it “correctly,” the greatest potential of engagement lies in the sustained willingness to simply “stay with” another. This willingness may need to weather awkwardness, uncertainty, intimidation, contradictions, fatigue and periods of hiatus and recuperation, but it can endure through the elasticity of the intention to “stay with,” which arises out of an uncomplicated awareness of the other person’s inherent value.

Art opens worlds of engagement; its functions of critiquing, uplifting and inventing worlds are arguably equally important. James’ practice of positively transgressing within art institutions, galvez’s embrace of vulnerability as central to transformative justice approaches that resist the prison industrial complex, and Oshagan’s view of vulnerability and resistance as powerful allies in ensuring the visibility and endurance of marginalized narratives, point to positive practices of engagement. In engagement, we battle and resist certain social constructions, while remaining present to, and holding sacred the value of, the individuals and natural environments in and around them, in order to arrive at new and mutually supportive normals.

We will not succeed at “staying with” others because it sounds like a nice idea; the orientation must take root as an unshakeable core commitment or belief. A spiritual and emotional intention to “stay with” eventually and inevitably arises out of thorough honesty, the kind that subordinates judgmentalism to the complex veracity of raw and deeply held emotions. In practicing engagement, we may initially expect to tolerate or learn more about those with whom we disagree. But the power of thorough honesty is in its mirroring potential (as artists who center personal honesty in their practices know): through others’ honesty, we see ourselves, not only how we are like them, but what we are like—that is, how we, too, enact untenable or fruitful contradictions, and are complicit in our shared reality.

This level of intimacy with others and ourselves, in disarming our defense mechanisms, makes room for nuance and discernment. Capitalism and communism have both “failed” as models of government; overemphasizing competition and simply giving all children trophies have both proven detrimental to the development of resilience and a sense of our own and others’ value. When entered voluntarily in a spirit of fun, where everyone can shape the rules, competition can generate excitement, discovery, innovation and growth that inspires and supports even those who end up “losing” one round. When undertaken as a strategy to control, possess, intimidate or exterminate, competition yields “Sophie’s choices” and unintended self-destruction.

Where, as Hedva noted, revolution can draw from the wisdom of illness in an ouroboric or regenerative fashion, our current “normal”—the one that created and perpetuates our pandemics—continues to eat itself alive without replenishment. Within our larger paradigm where life and death—seemingly at odds—cooperate, or enable or define each other, derivative interdependencies of seemingly contradictory energies, like “vulnerability” and “resistance,” are par for the course. Through engagement, we can consciously and artfully exercise, and exorcise demons through, those energies toward mutual benefit, rather than be pinned into one or the other through violence, reactivity and bewilderment, toward annihilation.

 

Nestled on the ground floor of an academic building on Pitzer College’s campus, the Lenzner Family Art Gallery is easy to miss. Its layout is as humble and curiouser still: an L-shaped room is flanked by two alcoves too small to be rooms and too large to be closets; the ceiling feels low, and the perpetual whir of air conditioning permeates the space (“It’s always on,” says Chris Michno, the gallery’s Exhibitions and Communications Manager). Jolted into a heightened awareness of one’s body in this setting, one asks, “Am I really in a gallery—what did it used to be? What could it be instead?”

Here, where our assumptions about public places are spotlighted and disrupted, Ashley Hunt presents Degrees of Visibility, a deceptively understated collection of photographs, drawings, maps, activist ephemera and other objects documenting and resisting what he terms the aesthetic regime of the prison industrial complex in the United States. “The prison industrial complex is a system of things we think of properly as prisons and jails and detention centers,” Hunt explains, “but also different regimes of policing, border security, surveillance, probation and parole systems, and the multiple economies that exist around and between them that form a carceral system. We think prisons bring justice to crime victims and have the possibility of healing [or] bringing peace to anyone and are essential for safety. But I see it as a sprawling system of relationships through which the dominant orders of Western society are maintained—so, colonial relations, dehumanizing relationships, relations that extend out of slavery, indigenous dispossession and imperial expansion, gender controls and normativity, and labor exploitation and politics. I think these are all part of the dominant order the system is really there to preserve, and is doing less and less of a good job at.”

With the highest numbers of, and exponentially increasing, prisons and imprisoned or detained people per capita, the U.S. presents a panoramic manual for the propagation of prison systems within and beyond a country’s continental borders. In the last nine years, Hunt has taken from publicly accessible vantage points over 260 photographs of sites containing prisons and detention centers across all fifty states and territories, where all carceral buildings—whether through occlusion by natural or manmade structures, remoteness, or appearing as something other than a prison—bear strategic facades reflecting local politics. Arranged in the gallery like stanzas of a poem—grouped, for example, in twos, threes or fours, clipped provisionally onto plywood or matted and framed, hung on a wall or angled alternately on the floor in call-and-response style—roughly half of Hunt’s total photographs are included in this exhibition, curated by gallery Director Ciara Ennis. Each of the show’s twelve iterations has featured different images and arrangements reflecting respective venues and local politics; these evolving poetic presentations echo the perversely poetic way in which the prison industrial complex, or PIC, has ramified throughout the country, adopting variegated camouflage to infiltrate diverse milieus.

The overarching aesthetic strategy of the PIC adopts twin tactics of normalization, where both peddle optical illusions tied to circular logics. The first tactic makes prisons blend in with their environments or appear commonplace; through outwardly resembling schools, civic centers, corporate office buildings or even grass-covered hills, prisons deter us from examining their interiors (of stacked human cages). The Miami Dade Juvenile Detention center in Florida bears a cheerful mural behind swaying palm trees and a towering barbed wire fence; without any signage indicating its purpose, we can only infer by its mural that the site is for children. Yet, as fences, cameras, guards and metal detectors in and around public schools and other institutions have become commonplace, the “Security Cameras In Use” sign on the fence legitimizes rather than red flags the site, and we walk by without further questions. The penetration of public places by carceral practices like surveillance systems points to normalization’s viral and circular operation: as prisons steal the facades of other public institutions, other public institutions absorb prisons’ tools of control and punishment. Thus, the PIC burgeons through conflation and consolidation, and we barely bat an eye at the lyrical sleight of hand whereby a former Walmart—emblematic of the exploitation of undocumented migrant workers—becomes a migrant children’s detention center at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The PIC invokes oppressive normativity as its second tactic of normalization. Through allusions to scientific or natural social orders justifying the isolation of certain categories of people—diseased, insane, homosexual, nonwhite, degenerate, or otherwise deviant—from society proper, prisons have been allowed to proliferate; in turn, by virtue of appearing commonplace, prisons seem to reflect natural or inevitable social orders. Again, a circular logic—that seduces a public standing at either end of the argument into accepting it as a truism—emerges as a hallmark strategy of the PIC in manufacturing political consent.

Hunt deftly captures the PIC’s deployment of normativity in his layering of visually understated landscape photographs and captions against equally quotidian grids and plywood backings. The raw plywood boards speak to naturalness and guileless candor, while the gridded paper “came for me as a reference to field notetaking, somewhere between that and architectural renderings and rational grids,” Hunt notes. Hunt’s formulaically conventional landscape photographs—employing the elementary rule of thirds, for example, or centering prisons or other structures where we would expect to find a photograph’s subject—invoke a repetitive visual—and ideological—syntax. Articulated through camera lenses Hunt describes as “at the edge of a wide field of view before bending off into distortion, or at the edge of a natural-seeming angle of view,” this visual syntax generates an undistorted, seamlessly continuous and ubiquitous narrative that points to a comfortably familiar and sustainable way of life that need not be questioned.

 

Taking visual dictation of what appears in plain view is referenced by the layering of photograph, grid and board, as is surveying land and recording scientific data, all alluding to the PIC’s ostensibly honorable practices of observing, planning, designing and building around self-evident natural phenomena such as landscapes and categories of people. At the same time, the imposition of the net-like grid on the untreated board suggests a more ominous impulse to capture and striate the untamed or wild. In so presenting poetic propositions where optics and meanings are densely layered, Hunt exposes the PIC’s aesthetic tricks of selectively framing and amplifying appeals to rationalism, naturalism and classification systems while diminishing or erasing detained people and the violence inherent to their detention. Inducing hypnotic persuasion, these manipulations mask while replicating a racialized agenda of control. “The ideology of criminal justice today is unquestionably the ideology of race, itself disguised as another science,” Hunt argues.

To escape the caging circularity of the “normal” conditions of our present, radical alternatives must be seen or imagined; in the same layered gestures through which he unveils the PIC’s strategies, Hunt, fortunately, points us toward a way out. “The primary poetic gesture of the work,” he offers, “is the juxtaposition between the landscape photograph and the number of people you can’t see but who offer another description of that space; the contradiction between what the image does and doesn’t show and what that number does and doesn’t tell is where I think the main poetic energy is.” Indeed, the counting and labeling of incarcerated people in both a conventional font and position below the image contours and flattens incarcerated bodies in a holographic or alternating manner. On one hand, we recognize the presence of distinct human beings although none are in view and decry their imprisonment. On the other, as quantitative captions were taken directly from prison websites, we read the PIC’s matter-of-fact designation of an othered group of people as uncontestable reportage; these others or “criminals,” we figure, ought to be put away, and the faint squares of the grid referencing jail cells help effect a clean, visually palatable erasure of the reality or even idea of cell occupants. In presenting competing dignifying and disappearing interpretations, Hunt forces us to acknowledge that both are operative at once, and that we, ultimately, are responsible for what we see—first in our minds, then in our world.

Blindness to our complicity in perpetuating the PIC has historically netted the progressive impulse to fall in line with normalization and “improve” prisons by making them “more normal.” “There’s a discourse around normalization in the sixties and seventies which was about trying to have carceral spaces feel less brutal, less austere,” Hunt notes, alluding to reform efforts aimed at softening prison conditions and treatment of prisoners, rather than the more radical alternative of eradicating prisons and punishment-based systems altogether.

Referencing one of his more distinctive framed pieces featuring the back cover of the B.B. King album, “Live at Cook County Jail,” Hunt explains, “The B.B. King concert [in 1970] is one of the more famous examples where musicians and artists went into prisons to do concerts in solidarity with prisoners around that timeframe. Reform-minded wardens would say, ‘We can have a concert for the prisoners.’” The concert crowd spanning the back cover points to, Hunt muses, “spectral bodies referenced only through numbers or imagination in looking at the [landscape] images.” While Hunt acknowledges that reform efforts have amplified the dignity of prisoners, he contends they do not go far enough; on this cover, he notes, the imprisoned bodies are “still very faint.” “More harsh and draconian treatment was reinstituted in the eighties and nineties,” Hunt observes, pointing to the fact that a fundamentally dehumanizing system only affords oscillating degrees of dehumanization.

When prisoners’ consciousness around the conditions of their imprisonment became too heightened, counterinsurgency architecture developed to reinforce normalization strategies and the PIC’s dominion. “One of the other histories of erasure came in response to the many rebellions within prisons of the sixties and seventies where prisoners were able to communicate with each other, organize, consciousness raise [and where] support systems outside the prison were able to grow,” Hunt notes. “Those all became threats to the system when they became articulated along the direction of social change, and that’s when you start to see the creation of permanent solitary confinement with supermax prisons and control units, keeping prisoners from communicating or knowing where they are, even. Around those kinds of prisons there’s more secrecy, more locating them farther and farther away from urban centers, making them hard to get to [and] further destroying families.”

At an extreme, castle motifs are instituted, manifesting the rhetoric of empire and war that underlies not only counterinsurgency architecture but the agenda of the PIC as a whole. Hunt observes, “Every big city has a federal prison, and they have a fairly unified architectural language that is erased of the historical signifiers of punishment we’re used to seeing, but that look like, at the same time, brutalist fortresses.” Sliver-width windows, like those of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the heart of Chicago, “come from castles and fortresses,” Hunt notes; his longer plywood boards and a framed horizontal piece containing multiple images reflect this narrowness. Rather than keep enemies out, Hunt further notes, penal fortresses like the Kentucky State Penitentiary, dubbed “the castle on the Cumberland,” are designed to contain enemies, particularly those likely to incite rebellion.

Several pieces acknowledging prison uprisings and their interlinked histories showcase text or information exceeding quantitative captions. Hunt commemorates the 1971 rebellion at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York with the sheet music for Charles Mingus’ “Remember Rockefeller At Attica,” mourning then-governor Nelson Rockefeller’s deadly decision to quash inmates’ demands for humane treatment by calling in the National Guard. Beneath his photograph of cotton fields surrounding multiple prisons in Atmore, Alabama, Hunt narrates an extended history of racism and forced labor culminating in a national prison strike organized by inmates in 2016 that commenced on the 45^th anniversary of the Attica riots. Alongside a photograph of Salinas Valley State Prison in a car’s sideview mirror, Hunt excerpts a 1971 interview with former inmate George Jackson, whose extensive activist writings and work were germinal to the Attica uprising; we note this interview excerpt challenges the prison image in size, as do letters placed beside images of other prisons where the respective writers were detained. These spoken words, letters, sheet music and Hunt’s expanded histories build up a chorus of uncensored consciousnesses, resisting with at least equal strength their oppression and creating an alternative network. Beyond reorienting our vision, thus, Hunt invokes vocalization to counter the PIC’s silencing, and we become increasingly embodied in relation to the work.

In placing us in the driver seat through his framing of the sideview mirror, Hunt further causes us to be embodied and mobilized; as sideview mirrors come with the alert that “objects in mirror are closer than they appear,” we intimately and viscerally gauge our personal proximity and relationship to what is reflected on our path. The framing of the prison in a rearview mirror also highlights the backward-looking trajectory of the PIC, where what lies ahead reflects and repeats what came before. “One of my last works before this was on the impacts of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans,” Hunt reflects, “which in many ways was about erasure—the disappearance of whole communities subject to the incredibly corrupt and racist criminal justice system in that city. Degrees of Visibility evolved out of a shift in my photography from describing what prisons look like, to describing how they’re hidden, creating an encounter for a viewer with that disappearance that wasn’t about the state of emergency that follows a disaster, but a sustained, continuous catastrophe that extends so far backwards.” While the reflected prison might be interpreted as inescapably following us forward, it can also be viewed as something we are leaving behind.

Our embodied agency in interpreting and responding to our environment is further ignited by the alternation of frames and clipboards throughout the gallery, where once again competing interpretations afforded by conventions are brought to our awareness. Framed gallery pieces are not to be touched, but clipboards are meant to be handled; we are further tempted to swap out photos on boards with some of the scores of loose prints on shipping crates in the center of the space. In omitting instruction as to whether anything may be handled, Hunt subdues the authoritative artist’s intention and activates our own. Yet, he does not remain neutral; as we circulate the gallery, mesmerized by imagery, our steps are disrupted not only by shipping crates indicating physical and far-reaching mobility, but also by activist ephemera and takeaway newspapers on the floor highlighting community gatherings and conversations resisting the historical erasure of organized bodies in dialogue. Usurping or reclaiming the quotidian aesthetic coopted by the PIC, these grassroots activities redirect focus from optical illusions onto human bodies, enacting a new normal or commonsense vernacular rooted in community-based care rather than punishment.

Having reenergized our sight, voices, and authority and ability to act through his artwork, Hunt invites visitors to participate in a ten-part conversation series on abolition scheduled through December 7 throughout Southern California, co-organized with artists and activists Silvi Naçi, Kenny Crocker and Jess Heaney. Reflecting his most extensive programming series to date around this work, Hunt and his team partner for this iteration with longtime collaborator Critical Resistance, California Coalition of Women Prisoners, Californians United for a Responsible Budget, Starting Over, Inc., All of Us or None, Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, NAVEL, Southern California Library, the Women’s Center for Creative Work and Claremont Colleges Prison Abolition Club, among others.

As distinguished from prison reform, abolition seeks not only to abolish prisons and punishment-based systems, but to reimagine how public safety is defined and maintained through overcoming what Hunt describes as alienation, and supplanting prisons’ ostensible roles (to hold people accountable and to rehabilitate, heal, or effect peace and justice) with locally-based practices of care rooted in listening to and addressing the histories and needs of those most impacted by the PIC. “All of the rhetoric around the ‘tough on crime’ movement since the late sixties in the U.S. has been this way of disappearing the reality of racism, classism, sexism and homophobia in our society behind a language of individual choice and weakness and failure, that totally alienates—and by alienates, I mean detaches the relationship in our minds and perception as to how social forces overwhelm people and how history lands on communities,” Hunt explains. “It might appear that it’s one person’s choice to wind up harming someone, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the larger social backdrop against which those choices become reasonable or the only choice. Whole economies that are black market economies have literally sustained communities who’ve been given no other way to survive. And I think the erasure of that historical reality is what we’ve got to get over.”

While even a handful of years ago the idea of eradicating prisons and punishment-based systems in the U.S. seemed politically unfeasible, Hunt and local activists who for many years have combatted plans to construct new jails or legislation aimed, for example, at prolonging detentions and sentences are beginning to witness a tidal shift. Hunt remarks, “What’s unprecedented about right now is getting a county like Los Angeles to recognize that what has been taken for granted for a few hundred years as a rational and effective way to address harm is actually not that. So, LA County’s decision to not build two new jails this year and instead commit to redistributing those three billion dollars to a new infrastructure of care throughout the county on a local and much more accountable level—I think that reflects something of a real kind of change that’s different than ‘fixing prisons.’”

As abolition gains traction nationwide through online platforms, its intersection with polarized online opinions on forgiveness, fairness, absolution and accountability (e.g., with respect to Botham Jean’s brother and a judge hugging Botham’s killer, former police officer Amber Guyger, in a courtroom) points to the danger of inadvertently replicating the punishing, ostracizing, flattening and exploitative discourse of the PIC online. “I see the contradiction that comes when one thinks about what possible limitations there are for a social movement that takes place within the same architecture that is set up to surveil and convert us into another form of commodity and raw material to be capitalized upon,” Hunt reflects. “But I disagree with a technologically deterministic view that because that’s where it’s taking place, nothing else is possible within it. A hashtag campaign is limited, but if it’s set up in a way that can take you deeper, that’s great. That’s how I think about art [here], too—if it’s set up so that all you do is look at this work and never have to think about it again, I don’t think it’s really doing all that it can. How can that work help interrupt these economies and histories and habits? How can it support work taking place on the ground that needs additional storytelling and image-making?”

In raising these questions, Hunt unveils perhaps the most invisible lens or point of view operative in his work, pertaining to his own relationship to it. As the poetry imbuing the show alternately reflects the PIC’s manipulations or inmate uprisings, it also undoubtedly mirrors the eye and heart of the artist—sober, haunted, meticulous, and wedded to a relentless and urgent sense of responsibility. “I always ask myself, ‘Who am I to tell this story?’” Hunt admits, addressing the irony or problem posed by his storytelling as a white male around a system that predominately criminalizes, disenfranchises and decimates communities of color. On reckoning and reconciling with his privilege, Hunt reflects, “My privilege affords me access to specific resources, and an inconspicuousness around locations of concentrated power [that] has allowed me to drive throughout the country and photograph prisons and jails and get stopped only one time, without consequence. A mentor in graduate school, an amazing anti-racist and Anti-Apartheid activist, told me, ‘You hear the honest conversations people in certain positions of power would never have around me, and you can help share that access.’ Another mentor, an elder Civil Rights activist, admonished that we ‘take the gifts, skills and talents we have received because of the privilege we have, and sit down, listen and serve.’ Although I have personal stories that have shaped me into one who would do work around the prison system, in no way am I one who is most heavily affected or at risk in relation to it. But that doesn’t mean I have no relationship to it—as one who sits comfortably within the violent fiction of whiteness, I am both the beneficiary of the system’s racism, and, as James Baldwin has taught perhaps most eloquently, impoverished by it. So, I work from a place of responsibility—as a fellow opponent of this system, with the aim to contribute to the knowledge, conversations and actions that help to change it.”

Among all of his captions, Hunt’s description beneath the site that once hosted the Atlanta Prison Farm run by prison labor is the most unusual. On one hand, Hunt’s historical elaborations and tallies of people incarcerated across multiple photographs can be read as memorializing the PIC’s conquests; such a reading is amplified especially where photographs and captions are matted and framed like awards. In a conversation held around a prior showing of this work (transcribed in one of this show’s takeaway newspapers), Hunt discusses with local activists the idea of utopias, where “the utopia of the oppressor” is a “paradise” evincing “perfected forms of control.”

Yet this photo, while using the convention of centering a structure where we would expect to find the photo’s subject, creatively pushes the possibilities of the convention to upend an oppressive reading. The centering of structures, particularly occluded prisons or vestiges of forced labor, not only creates a predictable visual syntax that might render the structures uneventful, but alternatively affords us the opportunity to detect or consider their presences at all, where, were they not centered, we might miss them entirely. Hunt’s lens flare across the center of the former prison farm building yields still another reading: in rending the emblem of oppression with a flash of illumination that both exposes and purges the past, Hunt creates an aperture or clearing for an imaginative new possibility to flourish. This alternative utopia is one of liberation and growth, expressed in Hunt’s foregrounding and cataloging of proliferating foliage. The center of the frame now delivers the radical alternative—a site without prisons—and this reading can be applied to all images in the show where prisons are hard to see.

In concurrent exhibitions at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles–based artists Beatriz Cortez and Rafa Esparza resist political declarations of border wall funding emergencies that reflect converging agendas and legacies of colonialism, nationalism, racism and capitalism. While a nation can, under these agendas, survive on and abhor the same migrant bodies of color at once—embracing their underpaid labor as necessary for capitalism while casting them as invaders subject to arbitrary deportation—Cortez and Esparza propose more liberating and sustainable simultaneities for nomadic bodies to inhabit. Cortez’ solo show, “Trinidad / Joy Station” and their collaborative work, Nomad 13 (2017 & 2019) are futuristic while incorporating Mesoamerican history. Invoking the cosmos as a metaphorical realm where borders prescribing territories, eras and identities are transcended, the artists encourage simultaneities of cultures and histories that resist linear, labor-exploiting narratives of progress embedded within capitalist modes of production and efficiency.

El Salvador-born Cortez envisioned “Trinidad / Joy Station” as a portable communal space station of the future where eclectic wanderers would find all they would need to joyfully survive, including geodesic domes, a water tower, seeds, latrines and beds. Steel undergirds much of the exhibition’s work, referencing industrialization and capitalism’s ubiquitous reach; yet Cortez leaves the steel in most works unsealed to resist the mandate to, as she notes, “perform shiny modernity.” Instead, the steel retains handprints of those who formed and handle the works, or is textured to underscore its organic qualities.

Cortez’ poetically anachronistic materiality also interweaves disparate geographies and cultures. Combining influences from the 1960s utopian artist commune Drop City in Trinidad, CO, and the ancient Mayan village Joya de Cerén unearthed in El Salvador in the 1980s, Cortez transformatively incorporates the past and present into imagined possible futures where cultures coexist rather than dominate one another. Her water tower evokes ancient Mesoamerican pyramid structures and LA electric towers, for example, while a Drop Cityesque geodesic dome built from LA car hoods is held together, like the water tower, by zip ties evoking her grandmother’s stitching, rather than in a manner boasting indestructible performance.

Cortez further transmutes materials used to detain refugee children at the U.S.-Mexico border. Often huddled on the floor inside chain-link fencing under thin emergency Mylar sheets, the children present a sweeping visual signal of urgent need, yet often remain in indefinite limbo. In weaving strips of Mylar into a petate—a Mesoamerican mat traditionally woven with palm fronds—on the ground, and through chain link into a cot and the cosmos overhead, Cortez poignantly creates a haven where children’s imaginations can soar. Through its sturdy construction and association with royalty in ancient codices, the petate offers children resilience and honor. Indirectly echoed in this work is the trauma Cortez herself experienced leaving El Salvador during a war. Her tie to Los Angeles is also referenced by chain-link fencing, which visually marks the entire urban landscape including many immigrant neighborhoods.

While the origin or context of Cortez’ references are preserved, boundaries between them are blurred or queered, enabling free movement. This queering occurs in the doorless conjoined latrines that blur boundaries between public and private spaces and erase the need to declare binary gender identities. Queering is also subtly referenced by the otherworldly, growth-supporting purple light over Cortez’ garden of indigenous seeds, and in the recurring motif of triangles in the structural geometry of the geodesic domes and as symbols of the cosmos. As triangles have historically condemned or empowered those labeled social “deviants” (including gay people, ethnic minorities and nomads), in this cosmic commune, all “misfits”—essentially, all of us—are widely reflected and embraced.

Rafa Esparza is also heavily invested in the terrain and people of LA. For Nomad 13, he and frequent collaborator Cortez made adobe bricks by hand with LA soil, river water and community labor, adapting the method his father used to build an adobe home in Mexico before immigrating to the U.S. Each brown brick, like unsealed steel, bears impressions of the bodies that crafted it and reflects the range of their skin tones, nationalities and ethnicities; together, they form a grounding base for a steel space capsule. Housing a garden of corn, quinoa, chayote squash and other seeds originally cultivated by the Inca, Maya and Aztec civilizations, this spacecraft carries human explorers into new territories with the aid of the portal-opening ceiba tree and Xolotl, an Aztec deity who guards travelers through unknown dimensions. Also the god of the disfigured and outcast and embodied here as a dog, Xolotl represents to Esparza the god of the queer, and a symbol of migrants and immigrants who might appear, to some, subhuman and dangerous. Basking in the same purple light that nurtures the same seeds in Cortez’ garden upstairs, this space capsule invokes its own boundary-crossing simultaneities and possible futures.

In their works, Esparza and Cortez honor manual labor processes reflecting the collective resourcefulness of migrant workers who, to survive, perform essential, arduous tasks for which they often lack prior training and that others refuse to do. This generosity echoes that of indigenous people who planted seeds like quinoa to benefit future generations, sometimes at the risk of losing limbs to colonizers; Nomad 13 and Cortez’ “seed bomb,” Jumbo (2018), ensure their generosity will persist. Through “Trinidad/Joy Station,” Cortez reorients laborers’ collective resourcefulness away from survival under exploitative conditions toward joy, facilitating what she calls “collective nomadic subjectivity,” or spontaneous, integrated activity akin to cells organizing into matter.

Cortez and exhibition curator Holly Jerger’s impromptu trip to the Bowtie by the LA River encapsulates this energy; purely for fun (and not under threat or for profit), they packed the geodesic dome panels into a car, zip-tied them in an improvised configuration for a sunset photoshoot, and disassembled and drove them back in the same day. Esparza and Cortez thus resist dehumanizing agendas, not through retaliation, but a transformative reorientation towards collectivity, fluidity, generosity and joy, alongside their simple statement as Angelenos: “I belong here.”