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Justseeds Prison Portfolio Project During the summer of 2008, Justseeds completed a portfolio project in association with the Critical Resistance ten year anniversary conference in Oakland, California, which took place on September 26-28th. Critical Resistance Ten was a gathering of activists, educators, and allies of prisoners who came together to promote organizing efforts against the monstrous excesses of the US prison system. The portfolio project involved twenty artists and one artist collective from the US, Canada and Mexico. Each one created an original print that either critiqued or addressed alternatives to the prison-industrial complex. Each artist pulled 100 prints and mailed them to Justseeds headquarters in Portland, OR, where the portfolio was assembled and then distributed. Justseeds archived two portfolios, sold 20 to recover the costs of creating the portfolio, and each artist received one copy. The majority of the portfolios were then donated to Critical Resistance and 23 other groups who are organizing against the prison-industrial complex. In the end, each portfolio included the 21 prints plus a CD with copyright-free high resolution image files of the prints (as well as other anti-prison images from the recent book Reproduce and Revolt, edited by Justseeds members Favianna Rodriguez and Josh MacPhee.) The portfolios have been used in a number of ways. Exhibitions, presentations, and discussions have been organized in numerous cities to bring more attention to the prison reform and abolition movements, graphics have found their way onto flyers and periodicals, and some organizations have auctioned their portfolio off as a way of raising funds. It is our hope that the images on this website (licensed under Creative Commons) will be widely utilized within the prison movement. If you use any of these images, please credit the name of the artist and Justseeds Prison Portfolio Project/ www.justseeds.org. Plus, let us know! Artists involved: Amor Y Resistencia links to artists' websites are on the links page Portfolios were donated to the following organizations: Critical Resistance (Oakland, CA) [25 copies] and: "Groups" page has links to these organizations
Exhibitions to date: Voices from Outside: Artists Against the Prison Industrial Complex Let Freedom Ring: book launch, calendar launch, vernissage in celebration of the struggle to free political prisoners Voices from Outside: Artists Against the Prison Industrial Complex Let Freedom Ring: An evening of political prisoner support, prisoner justice, and prison abolition Voices from Outside: Artists Against the Prison Industrial Complex Artists Against the Prison Industrial Complex Shaking up the Discourse Voices from Outside: Artists Against the Prison Industrial Complex Montreal Anarchist Book Fair
Talks / Presentations 1. “Illustrating Resistance” 2. “Poster Critique + Discussion of Visual Strategies for Resisting the Prison Industrial Complex with Dan S. Wang & Laurie Jo Reynolds” Saturday, February 7 at 6:30pm Tamms Year Ten is hosting an open discussion of the prints in the Justseeds poster portfolio ― each which critiques the "prison industrial complex." Let's talk about which images are effective for you--and use this as a basis for considering the visual and rhetorical strategies in the movement. We want to learn from the decisions made by these artists, and then we want to work with you to consider the very real representational problems we face as a movement! - How do we depict the experience of long-term isolation? Or communicate the experience of long-term incarceration? - What visual language will help us to imagine the abolition of prisons? To urge rehabilitation over punishment? - Can commonly used motifs―fists through prison bars/broken chains/doves/barbed wire/slave ships/prison stripes―still work? Are new metaphors required? We'll be talking about prison-related issues, but we hope that this event will be of interest to all artist-activists bedeviled and/or charmed by the problem of producing movement art which translates our political passions into visual form, renders visible the (often unacknowledged) problems of the present, and/or serves as an irresistible invitation to join us in our efforts to get free. We also invite you to bring other anti-prison movement ephemera (t-shirts, posters, stickers) for discussion! http://www.chicagoartistsresource.org/visual-arts/node/19026
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