Dedicated to critical cultural production at the intersection of art and activism.

At the start of this month, Chicago’s Mess Hall opened the TAMMS YEAR TEN CAMPAIGN / Justseeds Prision Portfolio exhibition, including posters, flyers, letters, poetry, postcards, banners, photos, videos, and ephemera from the multifaceted TAMMS campaign.  Justseeds’ Nicholas Lampert explains:

The event focused attention on the current campaign against TAMMS (a super max prison in southern Illinois) and urged more people in Illinois and beyond to get involved in speaking out and contacting legislators about the horrid conditions and the methods of psychological torture that take place at TAMMS.

Now the exhibitors have issued a call for an open critique of prison industrial complex inspired poster art (among other mediums) and are seeking input as to “how, as makers of images, we most effectively represent political positions and conditions.”  In question are the “very real representational problems we face as a movement:”

e.g. How do we depict the experience of long-term isolation? What visual language will help us to imagine the abolition of prisons? Do commonly used motifs—fists through prison bars; broken chains; doves; barbed wire; guard towers; slave ships; prison stripes—still work? How do we communicate the fact that Black men were tortured into confessions & our elected officials were silent with such force that it is discussed throughout the public thoroughfares & neighborhood byways? How do we dismantle the ideological infrastructure of the “Prison-Industrial-Complex?”

Further details, including contacts, schedule, and directions are available here.  (Facebook login is required.)

Related posts:

1. Impressions for Change: 35 Years of Political Posters from Red Sun Press
2. JustSeeds.org Booklist!
3. Now Available: “Art Work: A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics”
4. Art Work: A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics

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