EventsThe New Social Environment#92

Culture of Incarceration

Thursday, July 23, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Ron Bechet, Keith Calhoun, Dolfinette Martin, Chandra McCormick, Rontherin Ratliff, and Syrita Steib will discuss two exhibitions on the history of incarceration in Louisiana with Andrea Andersson and Mónica Ramírez-Montagut. We will conclude with a poetry reading.

In this Talk

Chandra McCormick & Keith Calhoun: Slavery-The Prison Industrial Complex is an ongoing series of photographs of African-American life within the Louisiana prison system that reached global audiences with Prospect.3 New Orleans and the 56th Venice Biennale. Their investigation, which began in the 1980s, probes the hidden realities of the state prison system and depicts scenes of forced labor, art fairs, rodeo pageantry, and familial visits all set within prison walls.

Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women of Louisiana, the current Ford Foundation exhibition, explores one of the most critical issues of inequality and injustice facing our nation today through the lens of a population too often overlooked. With an alarming rise in rates of female incarceration, this exhibition seeks to build awareness of the crucial issues that impact women before, during, and after incarceration. The exhibition presents works from more than 30 artists who created new pieces based on the personal stories of 30 formerly and currently incarcerated women: persisters. Stories of loss, hope, despair, survival, triumph, and persistence are shared in a variety of forms, demonstrating simultaneously the universal struggles faced by communities impacted by incarceration and the personal resilience of each woman featured.

This conversation crosses time and exhibitions to foreground a culture of incarceration, those whom it impacts most intimately, and the artists who tell their stories.

Rontherin Ratliff

Rontherin Ratliff is a mixed media sculptor whose work focuses on ideas of balance and the human condition. He blends functionality, aesthetic, context, and associations to address subjects of loneliness, loss, homesickness, memory, and the burdens we carry. Ratliff examines the metaphor of the body as a house where the mind dwells. Feeling at home or in harmony within including home as one’s origin or domestic place. The work questions the sociocultural constructed concepts of self. With it, he contemplates reservations regarding home as a safe-haven where one experiences positive qualities such as security and comfort. Using architectural materials and domestic objects, his work explores the notion of internal versus external balance.

Ron Bechet

Artist Ron Bechet is a native of New Orleans. He studied art at the University of New Orleans where he earned a BA degree and went on to earn an MFA degree from Yale University. Since then he has exhibited his work nationally and internationally. He is known for intimate drawings and paintings inspired by the land and circumstances of Southern Louisiana, knotted and matted and within the African Diaspora tradition of trees connecting earth and sky, the realms of the ancestors and the living. They tell a personal and communal metaphoric story of cultural hybridity. He is currently the Victor H. Labat Professor of Art at Xavier University of Louisiana and has been teaching for over twenty years.

Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick

Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick were born and raised in New Orleans. As husband and wife team, they have been documenting Louisiana and its people for more than 25 years. Calhoun and McCormick have documented the soul of New Orleans and a vanishing Louisiana: the last of the sugar cane workers, the dockworkers, the sweet potato harvesters, and the displacement of African Americans after Katrina. They photograph the traditions of black church services and religious rituals; community rites and celebrations, such as parades, and jazz funerals; and the cruel conditions of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a former slave-breeding plantation named for the African nation from which “the most profitable” slaves, according to slave owners, were kidnapped.

http://calhounmccormick.com

Andrea Andersson

Writer and curator Andrea Andersson serves as Founding Director and Chief Curator of Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, a non-profit institute for research, publishing, and exhibitions, committing to art informed by diasporic experience. She has organized exhibitions with artists including Troy Montes-Michie, Yto Barrada, Sanford Biggers, Cecilia Vicuña, Zarouhie Abdalian, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, and Adam Pendleton, among others; she co-edits a series of artists’ books with Siglio Press including Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible, Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, Hinge Pictures: Eight Women Artists Occupy the Third Dimension and most recently, Troy Montes-Michie: Rock of Eye. She also recently co-edited Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (Yale UP).

Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought

Mónica Ramírez-Montagut

Mónica Ramírez-Montagut serves as the director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. She previously served as the director of the Newcomb Art Museum. Prior to that, Ramírez-Montagut, she served as senior curator at the San Jose Museum of Art. Through her curatorial career, Ramírez- Montagut has worked with artists such as KAWS, Alejandro Diaz, Hope Gangloff, Andrea Dezsö, Kate Clark, Regina Silveira, Chelpa Ferro, and Erik Parker. Tapping into her experience as an architect, Ramírez-Montagut also curated exhibitions such as Restoring a Masterpiece: Frank Lloyd Wright‘s Guggenheim Museum and Zaha Hadid, a 30-year retrospective of the acclaimed architect who designed the MSU Broad.

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨