WORK BY ASHLEY HUNT

CURATED BY JACKIE CLAY

Degrees of Visibility is a nine-year survey of more than 260 carceral spaces throughout the U.S., examining the landscapes in which prisons, jails, and detention centers sit within all fifty states and territories.

Each photograph is shot from a publicly available point of view, from which one may or may not be able to see the prison, and is titled with the statistics, language and location of the prison itself. Statistics have been obtained from the facilities between 2013 and 2019, and, when refused, from informational websites, news stories, and governmental and non-governmental reports.

Degrees of Visibility shows an aesthetics of the carceral state, a visual politics of visibility and invisibility in a society aspiring toward freedom but rooted in captivity. In the space of this contradiction, this invisibility has enabled the immense growth of U.S. imprisonment since the Civil Rights Era, a century after chattel servitude was replaced by penal servitude through the 13th Amendment. Ironically, the system’s erasures also offer us a chance to imagine each landscape without its prison—its carceral relations undone and its costs redirected toward the building of strong communities.

This two-part exhibition, beginning in York at the Coleman Center for the Arts’ Pop Start Space, and ending up in Mobile at the Alabama Contemporary, was conceived as a platform for community discussion of mass incarceration and its effects on Alabama communities. It is accompanied by a new publication, made in an oral storytelling workshop with youth interns at the Coleman Center in Summer 2020, and the exhibition in York is installed in dialogue with a parallel exhibition of works by artists of the “Art on the Inside” project of the Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project. 

Degrees of Visibility was made possible in part with an Exhibition Grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Click HERE to read the Degrees of Visibility Newspaper, a take away newspaper produced alongside this Alabama iteration of this exhibition. 

COVID-19 PRECAUTIONARY MEASURES: 

To protect staff and patrons alike, Alabama Contemporary requires a mask and social distancing in the galleries. We’ve also amended our hours, are waiving admission, and placing limits on capacity. For more information on our COVID-19 opening policy go here. We encourage everyone to be safe and socially conscious as we all learn to move forward through this together.

OPENING RECEPTION: NOVEMBER 13, 2020 @ 6PM

Generous funding for this exhibition and related programming is provided by: