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Andrea Walls: Memes of Consciousness: Where Beauty Intervenes
On View May 7 through September 4, 2021. Free and open to the public. Working in collaboration with Mural Arts Philadelphia’s Guild Members of the Restorative Justice program and considering empathy as a framework for social change, the culminating video was projected onto the dramatic façade of Eastern State Penitentiary.
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Patrick Cabry: 500 Faces of Continuity
During his incarceration, Patrick Cabry drew portraits of the people he met in prison and their loved ones for favors, food, and money. In his installation at Eastern State Penitentiary, he continued this process drawing charcoal and mixed media portraits of approximately 500 visitors.
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Benjamin Wills: Airplanes
Artist Benjamin Wills’ ongoing correspondence with incarcerated people took a meaningful turn when he first asked one of these individuals to send him a paper airplane. Soon he had dozens of airplanes from prisoners around the country.
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Jared Scott Owens: Sepulture
The artist draws from his personal experience to create a symbolic burial of an individual struggling with incarceration.
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Erik Ruin and Gelsey Bell: Hakim’s Tale
The artist projects a paper-cut silhouette of formerly incarcerated activist Hakim Ali onto a cell wall.
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Piotr Szyhalski and Richard Shelton: Unconquerable Soul
The artists combine drone footage with poems written and recorded by people living in prison. The poems address the individual complexities, and shared universalities, of the prison experience.
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David Adler: Visions of the Free World
Nearly all prison visitation rooms in the U.S. feature photo backdrops, painted by the inmates themselves, to be used in inmate portraits.
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Judith Schaechter: The Battle of Carnival and Lent
The Battle of Carnival and Lent responds to the penitentiary’s narrow skylights and arched windows. The imagery, which Ms. Schaechter describes as “addressing in a non-religious way the psychological border territory between ‘spiritual aspiration’ and human suffering,” is evocative of theology but secular in purpose.
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Luba Drozd: Institute of Corrections
This video installation utilizes source materials created for correctional employees that include conferences, training discussions, and simulated scenarios. The artist edits the footage to uncover the system behind incarceration and the dialogue that goes on internally within the field of corrections itself.
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Alexa Hoyer: I Always Wanted to Go to Paris, France
The piece challenges this notion of prison life. Three televisions are placed in three different locations at the Eastern State Penitentiary: a prisoner's cell, a hallway and a shower room. On each television excerpts from over seven decades of prison film history are screened. The excerpts are chosen to relate specifically to the setting in which the television is placed.
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Ruth Scott Blackson: No Trace Without Resistance
The artist applies new paint chips, coated in gold leaf, to the flaking walls of an existing cell.
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Brian James Spies: Solitaire
Having spent time in solitary confinement as a teenager in a juvenile psychiatric facility, the artist relies on his personal experience to create a sound collage of layered vocal tracks on Eastern State’s audio tour player.
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