Our art studio is dedicated to creating graphics for social justice movements and developing advocacy tools that educate the public about critical issues affecting our lives. As art has always been at the forefront of social change, this work involves both celebrating important histories and challenging carceral systems.
The studio is equipped with tools for screen printing (excluding screen burning), printmaking, drawing, painting, and more. We open the studio for several different types of programming:
Liberation Lab
Liberation Lab invites cohorts of formerly incarcerated artists to create art-activism tools to address critical issues around the criminal legal systems that impact them, their families and our communities. Liberation Lab cohorts research, design and create engaging projects to educate the public around these topics and support campaigns for social change. We lean on the phrase “people closest to the problem are closest to the solution”. We use this framework as a starting point and also invite other (not formerly incarcerated) artists who are part of social justice movements. In addition, where we need skill-based support (i.e. how to make block prints) we will bring in a teaching artist to help lead the cohort through skill building exercises.
Revolution Per Minute Summer 2026
In this Liberation Lab, participants explored and responded to freedom music and generated lyrics for their own collective freedom songs. Listening, dancing, moving, and grooving were just one part of this workshop. The series also explores the role of movement in release and liberation, and how music and sound can transcend borders, barriers, and other forms of oppression. Participants engaged in writing, drawing, and movement to produce a set of artifacts, including songs and drawings. The final songs will be incorporated into an upcoming community-based project by the artist, Maria Gaspar, titled Revolutions Per Minute. Be part of the revolution!
Spring is Coming, MELT ICE Spring 2026
Formerly incarcerated people have endured militarized enforcement by police and prisons for years. Today we see the expanded criminalization of people through the violence of ICE operations. Artists have always resisted with stories and images.
As a part of this project, artists created one-minute animations in solidarity with impacted communities and to say HELL NO to more detention centers, more prisons, and more harm.
No New Prisons IL Print Portfolio Summer 2025
This portfolio of prints was led by Jimmy Soto from Build Communities, Not Prisons and Sarah Ross from Liberation Lab at Walls Turned Sideways. In the summer of 2025, fifteen artists came together over six workshops to discuss ideas of community safety, learn more about the state’s plans to build two new prisons, and to produce designs that focused on the themes of the No New Prisons campaign. The majority of participating artists were formerly incarcerated, collectively spending hundreds of years locked up. Between their personal experiences of life behind bars and research provided by No New Prisons campaign members, the artists generated compelling designs intended to ask questions and emphatically say, we need money and resources in our communities, not prisons. Learn more about this project here!
These Walls Do Talk Spring 2025
In the fall of 2024 the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights reached out to us at Walls Turned Sideways with the idea to commission formerly incarcerated artists who had experiences with solitary confinement to make animation shorts for a campaign to end the use of solitary confinement. It’s been well documented that time in solitary causes long term harms to people who are locked away. The National Alliance on Mental Health says “Those kept in solitary are often fed through a slot in their door, denied human touch, denied access to critical services or lifesaving medical care and ultimately trapped in a cell or “box” often without any knowledge of when their isolation will end.” Learn more about this project here!
