We Will Have Our Spring Opening Reception

We Will Have Our Spring is an exhibition which engages the relationships between environmental injustice and the United States’ carceral system. In recent years, the connections between policing, incarceration, climate crisis, pollution, and land management policy have come into stark relief through campaigns against toxic water in prisons, emergency grassroots responses to increasingly destructive hurricanes and heat waves, and the destruction of natural habitats for the building of Cop Cities (or police training facilities) across the United States. Some of the artists and organizers featured in We Will Have Our Spring call direct attention to carceral-environmental crises such as poor evacuation planning and carcinogenic water supply. Other projects take lessons from the nonhuman ecosystem––the plants, animals, soils, and water cycles that persist in and beyond carceral landscapes––to envision lifegiving worlds defined more by reciprocity, collaboration, and freedom than extraction, pollution, and incarceration. 

Curated by Gabrielle Christiansen 

Exhibiting Artists: Building Community Not Prisons, Carri Cook, Joe Dole, Darrell Fair, Maria Gaspar, Sarah Mecum, Lakeisha Murphy, Claire Penecost, Products of Our Environment, Requests from Solitary, Erika Ray, Marshall Stewart, David Storch, Mike Sullivan, jackie sumell, The Toxic Prisons Mapping Project, Luis Trevino, Ernesto Valle, and Alann Vega