In ‘Seeing through Stone,’ artists imagine a world without prisons

“Focus on the solution, not the problem” is well-worn advice, but it typically hasn’t been applied to incarceration. “Seeing Through Stone,” an ambitious exhibition co-hosted by the San José Museum of Art, UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of Arts & Sciences and Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos aims to change that. 

Featuring works by more than 80 artists and collectives, including 16 new commissions, “Seeing Through Stone” asks: What might a world without prisons look like? 

The show is a collaboration between the SJMA and the Visualizing Abolition, a Mellon Foundation-supported initiative at UC Santa Cruz. In 2019, Lauren Schell Dickens, chief curator at SJMA, approached Professors Gina Dent and Rachel Nelson, co-directors of Visualizing Abolition, and out of a 2020-2021 online public lecture series in which scholars, artists, activists and musicians envision various forms of abolition grew plans for a visual art exhibition. Each of the three sites — SJMA, IAS and SCBU — holds many artworks, and several artists and collectives are represented at multiple sites of the exhibition.

“It’s important for us to say this is a show about abolition. It’s not really a show about prisons,” Dent told the Chronicle via Zoom from Santa Cruz.

 “What the exhibition is doing is just opening possibilities for other ways,” added Dickens by phone from San Jose in a separate interview. “It’s part of the expanding constellation of prison abolition. It’s not the policymakers; it’s the organizing, the dreaming, the world making, that is just offering ways to see and live apart from carceral structures.” 

It’s hard not to long for the imagined futures suggested by many of the artworks. “Liberdade Zero (Freedom Zero),” video installations by the collective O grupo inteiro at both SJMA and IAS, show children aged 10 to 12 dancing in metallic silver capes as they imagine the freedom to travel to the moon. Robert Hillary King’s “Freelines,” the praline cookies King learned to make while incarcerated for 31 years — 29 of those in solitary confinement — at Louisiana State Penitentiary, can be found at all three sites of “Seeing Through Stone.”

In a room on its own at SJMA presides Charles Gaines’ “Sky Box II,” an installation of panels filling the full height and width of the wall. The upper panels display historic handwritten documents from the Dred Scott archive in St. Louis, Mo., while the lower panels transcribe the documents in legible print. 

For seven minutes, the panels illuminate the text clearly. Then over the course of three minutes — so slowly at the beginning it’s almost imperceptible — the light fades and the panels darken. For another three minutes there is no text at all, only expansive starry sky filling the whole room with a previously unseen cosmos. 

“It’s a really emotional experience,” Dickens said. “It’s really this viscerally expansive experience where you as a person are challenged to think about how you construct meaning, why it is you believe what you believe. … It forces you to intellectually wrestle with the limits of our own imagination.” 

Insistent that the show focus on abolition, the curators of “Seeing Through Stone” named the exhibition after a poem written by Etheridge Knight while he was incarcerated in Indiana State Prison. 

“We don’t want to reinscribe those harms,” explained Dickens. “We’re looking at alternatives, ways of living otherwise.” 

That said, a number of artworks in the show do directly address criminal prisons and other deprivations of liberty around the world, including colonial enslavement, border patrols and American Indian residential schools.

Sometimes the prison references occur in a transformative way. For instance, Maria Gaspar’s glass casts of bricks and cell bars from a dismantled Chicago prison lie translucently in SJMA’s gallery. Their fragile glass is breakable in a way the bricks and iron bars did not appear to be but ultimately were. 

Rebecca Belmore’s powerful “At Pelican Falls” offers healing to the wounds made by residential schools where governments separated indigenous children from their parents, forcing cultural assimilation. Belmore discovered a 1955 photograph of some of the kept children in their school uniforms eerily reminiscent of prison jumpsuits. A small headless torso dressed in the same jumpsuit wades through impossibly heavy waves of that fabric spread across the floor at SJMA, but hope can be found in the video the  torso faces where a figure repeatedly bobs up and down in the water. “It’s a cleansing,” Dickens said.

Artistically, “Seeing Through Stone” varies. Elegant abstract lines like watercolor stain three uncleaned bed sheets from a Virginian adult penitentiary stretched like canvas and hung like a Renaissance triptych in Levester Williams’s “To hold us all dear.” Seeing them at IAS will haunt me for the rest of my life. 

The sheets’ silent stories connect even if the viewer is unaware of Williams’s art historical reference to Robert Rauschenberg’s three-paneled minimalist “White Painting” from 1951 that can be seen at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

Other works in the exhibition, including musical compositions played over first person prisoner accounts and metal plaques with abolitionist quotes, don’t quite justify the intervention into the primary source material. However, it’s easy enough to move on to the standout works that can be found across the three sites of this sprawling show. 

“I don’t think it’s particularly controversial that the prison is harmful,” said Dickens. “The issue that might be controversial for some people is that they can’t envision an alternative.” 

For an invitation to dream those alternatives past the impenetrability of prison walls, a visit to “Seeing Through Stone” is warranted.

Letha Ch’ien is a freelance writer.

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