"Seeing Through Stone" Exhibition Opening Celebration at Barrios Unidos

UC Santa Cruz’ Institute of the Arts and Sciences, the San José Museum of Art and Barrios Unidos are pleased to announce Seeing Through Stone, a new multi-sited exhibition opening across all three locations this spring.

The seventy-seven international artists and collectives brought together in Seeing Through Stone, invite viewers to see beyond the current realities of prison, drawing attention to already existing practices of imagining the world otherwise. The exhibition includes sixteen newly commissioned projects, as well as works of video, painting, sculpture, installation, sound and performance. Together, these artists are part of the expanding constellation of abolition—the organizing, activist, dreaming and worldmaking to find solutions to social issues beyond prisons and punishment—that begins with the recognition of a possibility beyond our limited present.

The exhibition is co-curated by Gina Dent, Lauren Schell Dickens, and Rachel Nelson, as part of Visualizing Abolition, the ongoing series exploring justice, prisons and art, with exhibitions co-organized by the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and San José Museum of Art.

Seeing Through Stone

He sees through stone
he has the secret eyes
this old black one
who under prison skies
sits pressed by the sun
against the western wall
his pipe between purple gums
-Etheridge Knight, 1968

Prisons are so ingrained in history and the cultural imagination as to appear inevitable. From current structures of prisons, jails, and immigrant detention centers to past manifestations, such as Native American boarding schools and American chattel slavery, our world is bound together by carceral structures that equate punishment with justice. Yet as long as prisons have existed, alternatives to prison have also flourished. When poet Etheridge Knight (1931–1991) wrote from Indiana State Prison in 1968 of “seeing through stone,” he evoked the secret eyes of those able to see beyond the realities of prison to a world otherwise.

The eighty-one artists and collectives in Seeing Through Stone see otherwise. Sharing a capacity for radical sight, they include currently and formerly incarcerated artists alongside those without that lived experience from different sociopolitical contexts around the globe. Their projects include supporting creative networks in Guantanamo, educating youth in Rio de Janeiro, and organizing landless farmers in the Philippines, as well as more poetic and conceptual projects engaging an aesthetics of abolition. Their work brings into view a world where people seek safety with, rather than from, one another; where medicine grows from prison manure and land is cultivated for food, not capital; where blue finally means sky.

In sixteen newly commissioned projects, alongside other works of video, painting, sculpture, installation, sound, and performance, across three exhibition sites, Seeing Through Stone provides a model of hope in practice. The exhibition is a celebration of the expanding constellation of abolition: the organizing, dreaming, world-making, and creative activism around the globe that offers ways to see—and live– differently.

APRIL 19 @ 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Join us for the Opening Celebration of the multi-sited group exhibition, Seeing Through Stone, at Barrios Unidos on April 19, 2024.

This event is free and open to the public.

Seeing Through Stone is on view at Barrios Unidos April 19, 2024–January 5, 2025.