THE WRITING ON THE WALL
AT FIU'S FROST ART MUSEUM
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Raises Awareness About Mass Incarceration Issues
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Installation image of The Writing on the Wall, at the Frost Art Museum FIU (photo by Jose Lima/News Travels Fast)
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Florida International University’s Frost Art Museum, the Smithsonian Affiliate in Miami, announces a powerful new season of exhibitions and programming for Art Basel Season 2018 in Miami.
The Writing on the Wall, presented by Hank Willis Thomas and Dr. Baz Dreisinger (on view through through December 9), is a collaborative installation that raises awareness about mass incarceration. The U.S. is the world leader in incarceration, followed by Rwanda and Russia. In the U.S. alone, there are 2.2 million people in the nation’s prisons and jails - a 500% increase over the last 40 years, according to The Sentencing Project.
On the gallery walls are essays, poems, letters, stories, diagrams, and notes written by individuals incarcerated in prisons around the world, including the United States, Australia, Brazil, Norway and Uganda. During her years teaching in prisons, Dr. Dreisinger compiled these materials consisting of hand-written or typed messages by inmates.
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Previous installation of The Writing on the Wall at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Courtesy of Dr. Baz Dreisinger and Hank Willis Thomas
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Above and below: detail from The Writing on the Wall, at the Frost Art Museum FIU (photos by Jose Lima/News Travels Fast)
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The Writing on the Wall is part of the monumental art project For Freedoms, founded by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman. The fifty-state initiative is the largest creative collaboration in U.S. history. Through non-partisan nationwide programming, For Freedoms uses art as a vehicle to deepen public discussions on civic issues and core values and serves as a hub for artists, arts institutions, and citizens who want to be more engaged in public life.
“Our new season opens up a dialogue about global commonalities rather than differences, from ecological changes to societal values around the world,” said the Director of the Frost Art Museum FIU, Dr. Jordana Pomeroy.
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A billboard art installation, part of the "For Freedoms" national initiative.
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Voters in the State of Florida midterms just recently approved Amendment 4, to restore the right to vote for millions of people with prior felony convictions upon completion of their sentences (except those convicted of murder or other more serious felony offenses).
Approximately 1.6 million people will be granted the right to vote in Florida elections because of Amendment 4. A disproportionate share of those arrested and incarcerated in Florida are minorities, particularly African Americans. In 2016, more than 418,000 black people (17.9 percent of potential black voters in Florida) couldn’t vote due to their past felony conviction.
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Detail from The Writing on the Wall, at the Frost Art Museum FIU (photo by Jose Lima/News Travels Fast)
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Installation photo of The Writing on the Wall, at the Frost Art Museum FIU (photo by Zachary Balber, gingerphotoinc.com)
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A platform for greater participation in civil society via exhibitions, installations, public programs, and billboard campaigns, the initiative For Freedoms advocates for inclusive civic participation.
It is inspired by Rockwell’s paintings of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (1941) – “freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.”
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Detail from The Writing on the Wall, at the Frost Art Museum FIU (photo by Jose Lima/News Travels Fast)
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This collaborative installation by Hank Willis Thomas and Dr. Baz Dreisinger is a compilation of essays, poems, letters, stories, diagrams, and notes written by prisoners from around the world. The work draws attention to mass incarceration, now firmly rooted in the U.S. and the Western prison system which has spread across the globe.
Between 1980 and 2015, the number of people incarcerated in America increased from roughly 500,000 to over 2.2 million.
Though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32% of the U.S. population, they comprised 56% of all incarcerated people in 2015.
One in every 37 U.S. adults is under some form of correctional supervision. In Florida, 177,000 people are behind bars. (Sources: NAACP and the Prison Policy Initiative)
The written and typed materials were created by inmates, and were gathered by Dr. Dreisinger in the prisons where she taught. The focus of the exhibition shifts from venue to venue, in accordance with the selected writings on view. The exhibition coincides with FIU’s Common Reading Program and First Year Experience courses for university students.
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Dr. Baz Dreisinger is the author of Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World, which offers a radical rethinking of one of America’s most devastating exports and national experiments – the modern prison system.
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Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective identity, commodity, media, and popular culture.
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Above - Hank Willis Thomas, From Cain’t See in the Morning Till Cain’t See at Night (from Strange Fruit), 2011, features two black men facing each other, a football player and a laborer crouching among cotton plants, their faces hidden by a straw hat and a football helmet.
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Above Hank Willis Thomas, Branded Head, 2003, from the series Branded, Chromogenic print, Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY. Copyright Hank Willis Thomas.
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Installation and detail images from The Writing on the Wall, at the Frost Art Museum FIU (photos above and photo below by Jose Lima/News Travels Fast).
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The U.S. is the world leader in incarceration, followed by Rwanda and Russia. In the U.S. alone, there are 2.2 million people in the nation’s prisons and jails, and one in every 37 adults in the U.S. is under some form of correctional supervision - a 500% increase over the last 40 years. Though African American and Hispanics make up approximately 32% of the U.S. population, they comprise a disproportionate amount of all incarcerated people. During her years of teaching in U.S. and international prisons, the Professor Dr. Baz Dreisinger collected hand-written and typed writings from individuals who were incarcerated.
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Detail from The Writing on the Wall, at the Frost Art Museum FIU (Photo by Jose Lima/News Travels Fast).
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Dr. Baz Dreisinger is an American academic, cultural critic and activist. She is a professor of English at City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the founder of the Prison-to-College Pipeline and the Executive Director of the Incarceration Nations Network.
Dreisinger is the author of Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World, which offers a radical rethinking of one of America’s most devastating exports and national experiments – the modern prison system.
She is the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Art for Justice grant (together with the visual artist Hank Willis Thomas) and the 2014 Marcia Vickery-Wallace award. Dreisinger was born in the Bronx, New York, and graduated from Queens College, City University of New York, where she earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1997 and was the valedictorian. She attended Columbia University for graduate school, where she earned a PhD in English with a specialty in African-American studies in 2002.
Dr. Dreisinger was named a 2018 Global Fulbright Scholar for her work promoting education and restorative justice internationally and is the Director of the Incarceration Nations Network (INN), a global network and think tank that supports, instigates and popularizes innovative prison reform efforts around the world (bio source: Wikipedia).
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Hank Willis Thomas' work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography in New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilba; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands.
Solo exhibitions of his work have been featured at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah; California African American Museum; Philadelphia Photo Arts Center; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk; Cleveland Museum of Art; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Brooklyn Museum; and Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. Major group exhibitions of his work include the 2017 inaugural show at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town; P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Zacheta National Museum of Art, Poland; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, and the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art.
Thomas’ work is included in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Whitney Museum of American Art; Brooklyn Museum; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
In 2017, his For Freedoms initiative was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. Thomas is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize, Soros Equality Fellowship, Aperture West Book Prize, Renew Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award. He is also a member of the Public Design Commission for the City of New York. Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University and an M.A./M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts. He received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art, and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.
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Installation image from The Writing on the Wall, at the Frost Art Museum FIU (Photo by Amy Galpin, Chief Curator of the Frost Art Museum FIU).
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More about Art Basel Season
at the Frost Art Museum FIU
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Rene Emil Bergsma, Jet Blast, 2015, Video, Courtesy of the artist. Part of the exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago.
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Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago
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Miguel Luciano, Amani Kites, SmART Power, Kenya, Courtesy of the Artist
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Also headlining this year is Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (on view through January 13), the first major survey of this size and scope of 21st century art by 67 contemporary Caribbean artists representing 14 Caribbean countries. Their works offer expansive perspectives that transcend the boundaries imposed upon Caribbean cultures. “Because of Miami’s geographic proximity to the Caribbean nations, as well as our cultural mosaic which Caribbean cultures have shaped, it was important for us to bring this exhibition to Miami during Art Basel season,” said Dr. Jordana Pomeroy, the museum director.
Features nearly seventy works by Caribbean painters, installation artists, sculptors, photographers, video and performance artists. These artists connect through ideas that go beyond language barriers, politics, and historic colonial divides.
Artists in Relational Undercurrents include: Allora & Calzadilla, Edouard Duval-Carrie, Adler Guerrier, Deborah Jack, Glenda Leon, Beatriz Santiago Munoz, Angel Otero, Manuel Pina, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Jimmy Robert and Didier William, among others.
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Jimmy Robert, Untitled (Ompdrailles), 2013, Archival inkjet print, turned oak, Collection of Frac Grand Large — Hauts-de-France, Dunkirk (photo by Jose Lima/News Travels Fast)
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Relational Undercurrents features sixty-seven contemporary artists with roots in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Curacao, Aruba, Saint Maarten, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Trinidad, Jamaica, The Bahamas, Barbados and Saint Vincent. Departing from the premise that the concept of Latin America favors mainland countries, the exhibition proposes a mapping of the region that begins with the islands. Arising from a legacy of colonialism, recurrent themes include race and ethnicity, history, identity, sovereignty, migration and sustainability.
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Kishan Munroe, The Sinking of HMBS Flamingo, 2014, Oil and acrylic on canvas, Collection of Royal Bahamas Defence Force
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The works in this exhibition speak for the Caribbean’s indigenous peoples whose homes were fractured and divided by colonialism. These are spaces that were mercilessly exploited for labor and goods by distant European monarchies. This area also marks the site of one of the West’s first rebellions (the Haitian slave revolt which led to the independence of the island in 1804) and the Cuban War of Independence in 1898, a byproduct of the Spanish-American War.
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The Caribbean is inhabited by many different indigenous cultures whose languages include Spanish, Dutch, English, French and Creole. Although the Caribbean has been fragmented by centuries of tyranny and domination, the contemporary artists in this exhibition draw upon themes of connection that often envision what lies beyond imposed borderlines.
Relational Undercurrents is curated by Tatiana Flores, Associate Professor of Art History and Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University. This exhibition was organized by the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time LA/LA.
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Miguel Luciano, Amani Kites, SmART Power, Kenya, Courtesy of the Artist
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Conceptual Mappings
Artists in this section challenge the organization of traditional maps. In contrast to colonial maps, these artists create images that inspire a process of decolonialization, creating new spaces that suggest a more diverse, just and complex concept of the world.
Perpetual Horizons
Horizons are the prominent characteristic of island geography, representing boundaries and possibilities. Whether the artists in this section incorporate the horizon as a portal to the past or present, or as a representation of limit or potential, each artist in this section contributes to a common dialogue about this prominent feature where they live - offering strength in the acceptance of infinity.
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Marianela Orozco, Horizons, 2012, Digital print, Courtesy of the artist
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Landscape Ecologies
The Caribbean is a region of shared ecosystems and inhabitants. Artists in this section depict landscapes in relation with to history, ecological issues, and current social and economic issues. Perceptions of the Caribbean have shifted throughout history from those of wonder, to fears of disease and degeneration during the height of colonialism.
Representational Acts
All Caribbean islands have seen their autonomy challenged through colonialism and foreign occupations. Political agency is elusive and, in many cases, unattainable. Representation takes on an urgency for artists in Relational Undercurrents, who actively reconfigure the world they inhabit through social practice and self-expression.
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Above and below: Camille Chedda, Wholesale Degradables, 2014-2015, Acrylic paint on plastic bags, (photos by Jose Lima/News Travels Fast)
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David Gumbs, Water and Dreams, 2014, Digital video, Courtesy of the artist
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Nadia Huggins, Selections from the series Circa No Future, 2014, Digital photographs, Courtesy of the artist
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The 15th Annual Art Basel Breakfast in the Park:
Elizabeth Turk
Sunday, December 9 from 9:30 a.m. – noon.
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The Sculpture Park and the Frost Art Museum, at Florida International University
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An official Art Basel week event, Breakfast in the Park attracts art collectors, patrons, gallery owners, cultural luminaries and artists from around the world, many of whom are visiting Miami for Art Basel. Each year a noted sculptor is invited to speak. This year, Elizabeth Turk has been invited to Miami as the guest speaker. Guests enjoy a complimentary outdoor breakfast, informal lecture and guided tours of FIU's Sculpture Park and the exhibitions in the museum. View the Sculpture Park's artworks here. Presented in partnership with West Kendall Baptist Hospital.
Elizabeth Turk is an internationally recognized sculptor known for transforming her signature medium of marble into intricate objects that defy our preconceptions about marble. Through the use of electric grinders, dental tools and files, Turk pushes her medium to its limit, creating in each sculpture a provocative tension between the strength of the stone and its fragility, while addressing larger conceptual and spiritual concerns of time, matter and space.
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Elizabeth Turk in her studio
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Born in Pasadena and raised in Orange County, California, Turk earned her MFA at the Rinehart School of Sculpture, Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She is the recipient of numerous national awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Fellowship, and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Her work is in private and pubic collections nationwide including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (formerly the Corcoran Gallery of Art). and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, among others.
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One of the largest free-standing art museums in Florida, the Frost Art Museum at Florida International University was founded in 1977 and is the Smithsonian Affiliate in Miami. The museum's new lakeside building debuted in 2008, designed by Yann Weymouth (the chief of design on the I.M. Pei Grand Louvre Project). With 46,000 square feet of energy efficient exhibition, storage, and programming space, the museum was honored with LEED silver certification.
The museum's mission is three-fold: to be a campus resource for the entire FIU community; to offer interdisciplinary training in the arts for the next generation of artists and art historians; and to serve as a premier cultural destination for the residents of Miami, and the 15 million visitors to one of the world's most vibrant cultural destinations - home to global cultural events including Art Basel.
The museum offers programming that complements its exhibitions with a wide range of educational initiatives. Admission to the museum is always free. The Frost is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums and is located at 10975 SW 17 Street. Open Tuesday-Saturday 10:00 a.m.- 5:00 p.m., and Sunday noon-5:00 p.m. Closed on Mondays and most legal holidays. The Sculpture Park is open every day. More information at frost.fiu.edu or 305-348-2890.
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Chicago Blues Legends and Shining Stars are coming together for an all-star blues concert to support their friend and ally, Amberly Stokes. Amberly is a fixture in the Chicago Blues scene, leading various fundraisers for blues musicians and working tirelessly to keep Chicago Blues alive and well at Rosa’s Lounge.
