EventsCommon Ground
What's With All the Exhibitions About Prisons?
Featuring Ashley Hunt, Rachel Nelson, and Risa Puleo in conversation with Pete Brook
Thursday, June 17, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Curators and educators Ashley Hunt, Rachel Nelson, and Risa Puleo join writer and curator Pete Brook for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading.
In this Talk
Barbara Bloom
Artist Barbara Bloom (b. Los Angeles, California: 1951) lives and works in New York City. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; The Serpentine Gallery, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; among many others. An extensive survey of her work, The Collections of Barbara Bloom, was organized in 2007-08 by Brian Wallis for the International Center of Photography, New York, and traveled to Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin.
Rachel Nelson
Curator, writer, and educator Dr. Rachel Nelson is director of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz. She is currently working on a monograph, Seeing in Whiteout, focusing on the strategies contemporary artists use to reveal and disturb the racialized histories and presents of prisons and policing in the United States. Recent publications include book chapters, exhibition catalogue essays, journal articles, and review, included in the Brooklyn Rail, NKA, Third Text, Savvy, and African Arts.
Risa Puleo
Risa Puleo is the curator of Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System, which opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston and traveled to Tufts University Gallery. She is a curator of the 2023 Counterpublics Triennial in St. Louis. Puleo teaches art history at The School of the Art Institute in Chicago and in the Northwestern Prison Education Program.
Pete Brook
Freelance writer and curator Pete Brook is interested in social justice and the politics of visual culture. He writes and edits Prison Photography, a website that analyzes imagery produced within and about prisons with a focus on the American prison industrial complex. Prison Photography has been recognized as one of the best photography blogs by LIFE.com, the British Journal of Photography, and the Daily Beast.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.
Dao Strom
Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.
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 🌈✨