Marcus Manganni’s Queens (A Love Letter) lights up the night sky. Photo by LeAnne Alexander

A Time of Harvest

Art for Justice (A4J) Fund aligns artists, advocates, and allied donors to create empathy, transform the criminal legal system, and end mass incarceration. Through the work of grantees, the Fund seeks to safely reduce the number of people in jail and prison and shift the narrative around criminal justice reform through art. Until Art for Justice ceases operations next year (all grantmaking concludes by June 2023), we’ll share updates with community members via this monthly bulletin.

Here are some examples of the extraordinary work grantee artist partners are making. We’re excited that calendars are full of exhibitions, screenings, and readings by members of the Art for Justice community. Hope to see you at these events!
Jared Owen’s solo show 111...and Other Stories. Courtesy of Malin Gallery

Jared Owens exhibition: 111…and Other Stories
Malin Gallery
515 W 29th St, New York, NY
Closes November 12, 2022
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Hank Willis Thomas exhibition: Everything We See Hides Another Thing
Jack Shainman Gallery
513 W 20th St and 524 W 24th St, New York, NY
Closes October 29, 2022
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Sable Elyse Smith exhibition: Tithe
JTT
390 Broadway, New York, NY
Closes October 21, 2022
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Marcus Manganni with work from his exhibition Alive on Arrival. Photo by Amy Holmes

Marcus Manganni exhibition: Alive on Arrival
Brackett Creek Editions
75 E Broadway, Units 209 and 210, New York, NY
Closes October 27, 2022
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Xaviera Simmons exhibition: Crisis Makes a Book Club
Queens Museum
Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, NY
Closes March 5, 2023
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Film poster for Art & Krimes by Krimes.

Art & Krimes by Krimes: documentary film about artist Jesse Krimes and other Right of Return USA fellows
Director: Alysa Nahmias
Now playing at theaters across the country/soon to be televised by MTV Documentary Films

Nicholas Dawidoff, The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City
Publication date: October 18, 2022

Book tour reading dates:
October 19, 6:30 PM
New Haven Free Public Library (with Dwayne Betts)
133 Elm Street
New Haven, CT 06510

October 21, 7:00 PM
McNally Jackson
4 Fulton Street
New York, NY 10038

October 24, 7:00 PM
Politics and Prose
5015 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington, DC 20008

November 2, 7:00 PM
Harvard Book Store
1256 Harvard Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138

Spotlight on Arts Organizations

In addition to supporting visual artists, dancers, musicians, writers, performers and poets, Art for Justice has funded more than 50 arts organizations. Grantmaking to arts organizations is spearheaded by Amy Holmes. She leads Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisor’s New York Advisory team and directs strategic planning and program development for families, donor collaboratives and private foundations. Amy has been with the Fund since it launched in 2017 and brings deep experience around social justice issues. She is also a passionate reader, cinephile and photographer.
Amy Holmes with artist Dread Scott. Photo by Sara Golanka

“Art has always been my most important inspiration and the way I understand and relate to our world,” she observed. “Some of our artist fellows’ work has given me insights into the criminal legal system that I couldn’t have grasped in any other way—I’m thinking of Mary Baxter’s live performances as Isis tha Saviour, Jared Owens’ paintings, Liza Jessie Peterson’s one-woman plays, Mitchell Jackson’s memoir. These works have the power to transform hearts and minds in a way that reports and statistics often can’t.” We had the opportunity to interview Amy about some of the initiatives the Fund supports.

Q: Please describe A4J’s current strategy for its arts funding. How has it evolved?

(AH) Art for Justice has always funded arts organizations and individual artists as a means to end mass incarceration. But our strategy has changed over time. We initially focused on the ability of art to create narrative change, bear witness against injustice and raise awareness of the inhumanity of the criminal justice system.

We’ve also come to see artists as visionaries who can help us imagine a world that does not yet exist, one that does not rely on prisons and jails for public safety. It can be hard to envision achieving safety and accountability without incarceration. Art and artists can help illuminate a path to a world where everyone has what they need to thrive. The Fund is intentional about supporting art by people directly impacted by the criminal legal system. We believe those with personal experience must be the ones to lead the movement.

Q: Why does A4J support arts organizations?

(AH)
Strong arts organizations provide opportunities for artists to become part of a sustainable ecosystem. They bring great works of art to readers, viewers, collectors, and audiences everywhere. We support arts organizations to commission, exhibit, and publish the work of those proximate to the criminal legal system to affirm the value of this work and its ability to inspire change. We rely on institutions that champion formerly incarcerated artists to bring this work to the public.

Q: What kinds of outcomes and impacts are you seeing via arts organization grantee partners?

(AH)
Our partners have achieved amazing success and we’re so proud to support their work. A few examples:

Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration opened at MoMA PS1 in 2020. When I saw the show, it was the first time I’d been inside a museum since Covid began. I remember being overwhelmed by Mark Loughney’s Pyrrhic Defeat, over 700 portraits of incarcerated people. Mark was still in prison and the passage of time the piece represents is especially intense. His release earlier this year is something for our whole community to celebrate! Marking Time has since traveled to the University of Alabama - Birmingham, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, and the Bell Gallery at Brown University. Curator Nicole Fleetwood won a National Book Critics Circle award and she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. This exhibition will continue to reach people, documenting liberation and resistance through art.
Lynn Nottage, playwright, and Kate Whoriskey, director, celebrate the opening of Clyde’s. Photo by Erin Baiano

I loved Second Stage Theater’s Broadway production of Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s in 2021. The play is about a sandwich shop that employs people who’ve just been released from prison. It captures injustice, the devastating effect of incarceration on individuals and families, and the ways formerly incarcerated people are often treated unfairly by employers, public service agencies, and the parole system. But it also highlights the benefits to employers of hiring returning citizens and how important good jobs are to successful reentry.

PEN America created its Writing for Justice Fellowship, matching incarcerated writers with mentors to help them craft commissioned works that illuminate issues of incarceration. Earlier this year, they published a collection The Sentences that Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison that shares advice and inspiration from justice-involved writers to help others develop their voice.

University of Arizona’s Poetry Center is publishing an anthology of incredible writers called Like a Hammer Across the Page. Haymarket Books will release it in 2024. I’m thrilled the book will also be distributed by poet Dwayne Betts’ organization Freedom Reads to ensure it reaches incarcerated readers and writers.

Q: How do arts organizations and advocacy groups work together towards ending mass incarceration?

(AH)
We believe artists and advocates working together effectively advance change. A collaboration that comes to mind is Designing Justice Designing Spaces (DJDS), an architectural firm that is literally constructing spaces for healing and accountability, instead of detention and punishment. Their collaboration with Restore Oakland led to the development of the Center for Restorative Justice in East Oakland. It houses the Ella Baker Center’s anti-incarceration youth programming, and a restaurant and social entrepreneur site operated by ROC United. DJDS is also working with the City of Atlanta to repurpose a city jail into a center for wellness, healing and skills-building for people impacted by incarceration.
Artist, poet and A4J grantee partner, Faylita Hicks.

Another example is Civil Rights Corps, a legal advocacy organization seeking to end the use of cash bail and other unjust practices through litigation. They host a residency program for poets, visual artists, musicians, and writers to use their practice to shine a light on the brutality of mass incarceration and imagine a better and fairer future. A current poet, filmmaker and performance artist-in-residence is grantee partner Faylita Hicks. We hope more advocacy organizations take inspiration from this kind of partnership, it’s a powerful model.

Stanley Whitney Supports Intersectional Justice

On October 7, Artsy held a single-lot auction of Stanley Whitney's new painting: The Freedom We Fight For, 2022 in collaboration with Gagosian Gallery. Proceeds were generously donated to Art for Justice Fund and Planned Parenthood of Greater New York to support the urgent battles for decarceration, justice reform and reproductive rights in the United States.

Agnes Gund and Art for Justice have a longstanding relationship with Whitney. After selling her treasured Lichtenstein (Masterpiece, 1962) to launch A4J in 2017, Gund replaced it with Whitney’s By the Love of Those Unloved (2004) over her mantle. Similarly, Whitney donated ten percent of his sales from his No to Prison Life exhibition to the Fund in 2020.
Stanley Whitney and The Freedom We Fight For. Photo by Chris Cardoza.

“Stanley Whitney is supporting criminal legal system reform, racial justice, and reproductive rights in a way that is both inspiring and demonstrates the remarkable ability of art to imagine a better world. We are moved to receive this gift alongside Planned Parenthood, whose work is essential to reproductive freedom and providing health care to those who need it most,” said Gund.

Helena Huang, Project Director, Art for Justice Fund observed, “His gift shows how our two issues are inextricably linked. People of color and poor people are already disproportionately represented in our criminal legal system, and they are the ones who will suffer and be criminalized further under these regressive abortion policies.”

Art for Justice believes artists can help us see these connections: art creates empathy; empathy creates understanding; understanding creates change. Whitney’s sale furthers a model wherein art becomes the very means by which transformative justice is secured.
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