Florida Prison Education Project: America’s Carceral Landscape

Conceiving of the carceral landscape as both a physical space and a metaphorical construct, the collected works ask: What is the relationship between spaces and systems of discipline and punishment? How do the visual arts function as effective sites of critical and artistic engagement, and can they disrupt physical and psychological spaces of power? How do artists represent the trauma of incarceration, racial injustice, and dislocation? American jails and prisons have inspired artists, both incarcerated and non-incarcerated, to respond to their physical environment with visual art, but systems of power impact both the conditions under which these artists create and shape the circuits through which others engage with the resulting artwork. The uneven systems of policing and surveillance that constitute the carceral landscape are at the heart of this exhibition, which draws attention to the ways in which enslavement, relocation, detainment, and internment institutionalize and normalize systems of inequality and injustice.

Exhibiting artists include Omari Booker, Matt Watson, Christopher Etienne, Jason Fronczek, Alexander Alvarez, Mark Strandquist and Courtney Bowles, and FPEP incarcerated students.