Resisting Incarceration Culture
An Exhibition of CCA Students, Alumni, FAculty, & Collaborators
Organized by Malic Amalya
Co-Curated by Malic Amalya, Annah Anti-Palindrome, & Michael Washington
Oliver Art Center, California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA: 2020
Claudia Bernardi and Central American Incarcerated Minors, Anthea Black and the Queers Crash the Beat Collective, Coaxoch, The Decolonial School at CCA, Valentina Miranda Di Castri, Beatriz Escobar, Arthur Gonzalez, Shylah Pacheco Hamilton, Angela Lutz, Claudia Lutz, Jason McDonald, Pallavi Sharma, Karen Seneferu, Katie Smart, Allison Smith, Tina Takemoto, Sonya Thorne, Consuelo Tupper, Amanda Walters, Christine Wang, & Samaiyah Zareef-Mustafa.
We have aimed for an exhibition that espouses an abolitionist politics, one that undoes our attachments to the cultural logics that makes the prison industrial complex appear normal and a necessary remedy to violence. The art included in this show helps us imagine a world where prison, immigration centers, jails, court rooms, internment camps, and other interlocking systems of incarceration are not seen as solutions to harm, but as reproducing harm on systemic levels. We have chosen works that encourage us to desire a different world where violence against the most vulnerable of society can be ended without prisons and where the roots of violence can be addressed in ways that do not rely on the police state or aggressive regimes of captivity.
