Image by Jesus Barraza.
Created for the Critical Resistance ten year anniversary conference in Oakland, California, which took place in 2008. Critical Resistance Ten was a gathering of activists, educators, and allies of prisoners who came together to promote organizing efforts against the US prison system.
Just seeds organized an art portfolio in collaboration with Critical Resistance Ten called Voices From Outside: Artists Against the Prison Industrial Complex. The portfolio project involved twenty artists and one artist collective, with work coming from the US, Canada and Mexico. Each print critiqued or addressed alternatives to the prison-industrial complex.
Against a bright yellow background, the smiling face of Leonard Peltier is rendered in brown tones. Text states, “I sincerely hope your campaign will inspire some hope among our youth to struggle for a better future. I am, however, concerned that your recent statement on the Sean Bell verdict, in which the New York police officers who fired fifty shots at a young man on the eve of his wedding were acquitted of criminal charges, displays a rather myopic view of the law. Until the law is harnessed to protect the victims of state violence and racism, it will serve as an instrument of repression, just as the slave codes functioned to sustain and legitimize an inhuman institution. — In a letter to Obama. Leonard Peltier.” “Prison equals Slavery.”
