This conversation with the artist Maria Gaspar centers thinking about the relationship between art and protest, visual offerings, and an abolitionist aesthetics of possibility. We speak about avenues of liberation that emerge when we broadcast the voices and stories of those deprived of freedom. We think about how to nurture artistic practices that build an ethics of objects through which new (and often repurposed) materials engender curiosity, joy, care, and love.
Gaspar and I ask about the connection between art making, space, and the body. How does art allow us to collaboratively tend to the precarity of this political moment and create meeting grounds for communities to come together? The idiosyncrasies of how we arrive are just as important as the destination.
Latinx artists in the United States have significant contributions to make in a time of massive captivity, environmental catastrophe, and genocide. Gaspar’s work is at the forefront of emerging creative spaces and practices that are reshaping assumptions about prisons and, more importantly, our reliance on the logic of punishment. In each of Gaspar’s artworks, pathways of possibility reveal themselves when we listen to the voices of people cast out of society, incarcerated, and forced to exist in a realm of nonbelonging. Radioactive: Stories From Beyond the Wall plays a unique role in Gaspar’s overall body of work by drawing attention to the role of viewer and asking how we maintain the logic of punishment in our practices of observation.
This interview has been shortened and lightly edited for readability.
Itzel Corona Aguilar: In a filmed discussion of your 96 Acres Project (2012–2016), a series of community-engaged and site-responsive art projects involving community stakeholders’ ideas about social and restorative issues and the impact of the Cook County Jail on Chicago’s West Side, you recollect your first encounter with the jail as a child attending a school field trip. The “educational” excursion was facilitated by your Catholic school in collaboration with the Scared Straight program, an initiative that originated in the 1970s through which formerly incarcerated people at Rahway State Prison in New Jersey discouraged local youth from engaging in “crime.” It is clear throughout your body of work that your upbringing in Little Village, Chicago has influenced your artistic practice. Even though each one of your projects stands powerfully on its own, your work embodies a sort of practice of accumulation, a building of ongoing ideas, aesthetic expressions, and possibilities for envisioning a world without prisons.
The notion of place is further elaborated, honored, and even problematized in your work. Your projects provocatively demonstrate how the social and political fabrics of La Villita and beyond are dyed by various complex and often competing ideologies of citizenship, belonging, punishment, and futurity. I grew up in San Antonio, Texas, after migrating from Mexico in 2001, three months before 9/11. A quintessential experience of growing up in San Anto was attending a school field trip to the San Antonio Missions, a colonial terrain disturbingly classified as a National Historical Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Federal, state, and local funds are attributed to the preservation of four missionary sites of colonization, visually marking a period of harrowing violence against Indigenous communities and new Mexican migrants of the region.
I share all of this to reflect on the relationship between art making and belonging. Growing up in a city shaped by local prisons, immigration detention centers, and military bases, it is not difficult to think about the carceral continuum and how it’s tethered to all aspects of society. You learn to see differently when socialized in an environment where border patrol recruits on college campuses and most of your peers, friends, and even family are directly impacted by the prison system through either employment or experiences of incarceration. What visions of abolitionist futurity does your work unearth? How are your audiences transformed by the possibilities of envisioning alternative futures?
Maria Gaspar: I’m in the process of putting together a packet of my body of work, so I have been thinking a lot about my own teaching practice. As I rework the teaching philosophy, looking back at different moments over the years, what has been on my mind are the different caretaking roles I hold. As a parent, or a caretaker for community members, family and friends, a teacher, and an artist who works in community, my personal evolution has magnified extensively because of how these new responsibilities and commitments in my life hyper-amplify injustice. I feel even more compelled to do something through my work. I share all of this to say that this work is very personal to me.
Sometimes people will ask me, “what was the initial moment that sparked your interest in prisons?” I really don’t know how to answer this question. Usually, the person asking is searching for that one singular moment. In academic spaces there tends to be a desire to trace that one moment that defines everything. As you’re pointing out with your own experience growing up in San Antonio, it was about a whole environment and lived experience for me too. The jail visit as an elementary student, growing up around different organizations, nonprofits, as well as gangs, and witnessing ICE raids in my neighborhood, established notions of risk and precarity.
When I look back on my childhood, I think about how the carceral space was embedded in all parts of the neighborhood and beyond. The way the jail took up space, not only because of its sheer size, but also because of how we were all very aware of it. We all knew when a community member was inside or recently locked up. When you walked by the jail you would get hollered at because of the closeness of the street to the jail windows, which really collapsed time. The massive jail compound is walled off, but it is sonically and visually embedded in all the psychosocial ways that it exists. When you are young, you see these things existing together, but you do not always know how to make sense of it or understand it, and nobody in my circle was talking about abolition.
ICA: I am also asked about why I began studying detention centers. People want to hear about awakening moments, epiphanies if you will. Instead, it was a series of events that were very embodied, based on feeling and, as a child, I didn’t have the tools or language to talk the sense that something was wrong.
For me, it also came from being in spaces led by nonprofit legal services organizations working to educate San Antonio communities about the practices of detaining migrants. Those efforts, although well intended, often made me feel uncomfortable due to the language they employed to represent undocumented communities, upholding a logic of purity that discards migrants who are criminalized. Of course, as a child, you do not always have the language to discern why that binary is being set in place. Over the years, this is what motivated me to critique and challenge a lot of these well intended efforts (even my own) that struggle to attend to the complexities of migrants’ lives.
Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall is a series of community-engaged radio and visual broadcasts connecting two architectural monoliths of Chicago’s West Side: the Cook County Jail and the working-class residential area of the Lawndale communities. Voices and stories of those currently incarcerated are broadcasted and projected from inside Cook County Jail to community members outside its border. The piece debuted in September 2018, in a large-scale public art event at the north-end wall of the Cook County Jail. Community members came together to witness the wall turn into a screen with the projected animations created by currently and formerly detained individuals paired with accompanying audio recordings. Can you speak on the goals of Radioactive, both as an artistic installation and a political intervention?
Abolitionist trainings and longings are being addressed and nurtured across various spaces. I’m thinking about the migrant justice movement’s embrace of anti-prison initiatives first developed within the Black intellectual and activist tradition. By replicating these tactics in our movement, a lot of possibilities have emerged. There is a lot of room to challenge and build on ways of thinking about abolitionist futurity without necessarily using the term. Not because of censorship; rather, to challenge ourselves and others, to think about different ways of visualizing, describing, and embodying what a world where no one is deprived of their freedom looks like, without asking “abolition” as a term to do all the work. As we discuss Radioactive, I want to hear about what language, traditions, and practices help you visualize and materialize abolitionist futurity.
MG: I’m inspired by people like Mariame Kaba, who was in Chicago for some time. Early on, 96 Acres Project involved a collaboration with Mariame and Bianca Diaz, who is fabulous artist now based in New York. Mariame taught me how the linkages between art and activism are so layered. Her approach feels meaningful, and I see her as an important figure in my thinking of futurity and hope. I’m also influenced by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and the way she talks about abolitionist geography. When I was reading her work it really clicked for me, and the work I have been involved in over the years visually and materially reflects the potential transition from carceral geography to abolitionist geography.
Because I come from a public art practice and the Chicago mural movement, I’m interested in spatial practices. I have been thinking more intentionally about how the work I’m making both critiques and offers something new. I’m aware that I will not have a solution or a single answer, but through material embodiment, sound, installation, and performance, the audience can experience and feel, through an idea, projection, glass, or sound, that the art is evoking or provoking something. Whether the person is familiar with the ideas or not, it’s still an invitation. This is something I really care about and why I’m an artist.
When words fail me, I can make up for it through material, visual, or sonic projects. This is something I discuss with my students too, especially right now. After a combination of events, including the recent loss of my mother (she was paralyzed for some time), becoming a new parent, and being unable to enter the jail because it was considered a “hot spot” during the pandemic, I started to think about materiality. The history of material and the meaning embedded in something like the jail bars. Even the wall for Radioactive was not just a surface—it was an obstruction to penetrate and a barrier to make porous. What can a wall become instead of a wall? It can become a microphone or an amplifier. It could be a wall with holes. It can start to disintegrate. It can fuse. It can do all these different things. This speculative and imaginative project was a way for me to enter this conversation.
ICA: I was very drawn to this piece because of its approach to broadcasting the voices and intimate stories of people currently or previously incarcerated at Cook County. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, I was doing a lot of organizing work in the tri-state area. I was part of the New York Abolish ICE coalition, which included over 35 different groups of legal service providers, advocates, and community members. At the time, I was employed as a paralegal at a small legal services nonprofit, responsible for managing a rapid response hotline for migrants detained in the tri-state area. My job consisted of screening people who reached out to our hotline and providing a brief legal assessment of the viability of their immigration case. The two attorneys on our team often described these legal screenings as a form of triage. As most people who work in non-profits know, we had very little recourse to support the large number of people who contacted our hotline.
As the pandemic unfolded, most people reached out to the hotline to report abuses and violations, including cruel punishment by guards, insufficient efforts to prevent spread of COVID, forced solitary confinement as a measure to prevent contagion, no communication with the outside world, and inability to continue faith-based practices. These abuses were fueled by the already precarious conditions of the detention center and the never-ending threat of deportation. The increase of migrants in detention in the tri-state area who were reaching out to our hotlines, which were originally intended for immigration legal services, led us to report the violations that were being communicated to us. My role shifted from paralegal to visualizing and organizing how to connect with other organizations already working on prison abolition.
Community members and advocates collaborated with migrants to initiate hunger strikes inside and organize protests outside of the detention centers. Even though there was a broader goal of educating the public and abolishing these detention centers altogether, we were also collectively setting daily goals to address the immediate needs of people who were detained, like access to face masks and protective equipment. Among these needs was having their voices amplified and heard by the community, stakeholders, and anyone who had power in deciding whether the facility remain open.
A common strategy we employed was broadcasting the voices of people inside through the “Getting Out” app used to communicate with incarcerated individuals. This strategy presented issues and barriers that we had to figure out as we went. We also shifted to different variations of this strategy, using audio recordings to prevent the jails from intercepting the calls the day of an action. Although we often received positive feedback from people inside, we also faced a lot of obstacles with this approach. It was common for the guards to cut the phones the day of protest resulting in unintended consequences to the population we were aiming to support.
What avenues of liberation emerge when we broadcast the voices of those currently or previously detained? The immigrant rights movement more broadly has often reified a logic of deservingness and outstanding virtue that inherently marks certain migrants as disposable, typically criminalized Black, Indigenous, trans, queer, and disabled migrants, whose bodies are categorized as a threat and abhorrence to the state. Although there has been shifts in how stories are being told, I see the role of art as pivotal to breaking these binaries and providing us with creative measures to envision alternate approaches.
How does Radioactive speak to the relationship between art and protest? In one of the videos you published alongside this project, the audience sees a meeting taking place between you and several stakeholders of Cook County Jail. There is a discussion taking place about potentially censoring the narratives of the participants. What role does art play in diffusing or strengthening these tensions? And perhaps more importantly, how do we build an ethics for doing this work?
MG: I love how you described the work you were involved in. When I think about doing any type of creative work, I feel the most transformative type often happens outside of the art institution, where people are responding to a need, problem solving, and responding in the immediate. What you were describing reminded me of the creativity that happens in organizing work. I’m thinking about this in two ways right now: through slowness and through speed. What do these approaches offer us? What speed does it require? How does the pace impact the experience? Maybe a need requires an immediate response or one that unfolds over time. Or both. How might they work together?
The woman in the scene you are referencing was the communications spokesperson for the jail. She took a liking to us, I think. During the experience we met people who are visibly or invisibly trying to help. Sometimes it’s not explicitly stated, but one understands that it’s a strategy. This help often means that we are “allowed” to do certain things, while still abiding to a set of terms and regulations. The spokesperson for the jail helped get approval for us to do the project and document during the workshops, which required all the ensemble members sign photo consent forms. She had to be there every time the documentary filmmaker was there. She helped broker the final project. I did not preplan how that meeting with her would go because we were not working together, but she did come through for us in that moment, which is why I decided to keep that scene in the film for Radioactive. It illuminated for us all the different negotiations that are happening.
When we recruited the ensemble members for the Radioactive Project, my collaborator, Michael De Anda Muñiz, and I walked into the jail tiers with no more than five minutes to pitch the project to 75 or 100 people per room. We would say, “hey, we’re independent artists and we are doing an art project if anyone wants to come. We will meet twice a week for two hours. If you want to sign up, here is the list. Put your name down.” We had to keep it short. It was loud and hard to project your voice in those very echoey rooms. We made sure to state that “you do not need to be an artist; you just have to be interested.”
Many of the ensemble members just wanted to get out of the tier because there is nothing to do. They talked about the jail space being hyper-stimulating and about being unable to access a space to think. We knew that everyone came from different walks of life. Some knew how to read, others did not. Some were already writing poetry and drawing; some were totally new to it. We started by reading a poem by Assata Shakur and talking about metaphor. Then we annotated the poem into a drawing or a sketch. It was a good entry point. We moved on to Doris Salcedo’s work, which deeply impacted the ensemble. They said, “this is amazing, we did not know you could make art with rose petals!” Salcedo is talking about violence, pain, and grief, and expressing those feelings through evocative and beautiful materials. That was the moment it clicked for a lot of the ensemble members. We talked about public art and what it would mean to do public artwork at a jail. What did we want to communicate and who were our audiences? Because they were all awaiting trial, we were mindful of using recorders and making sure we were not recording something that could be used against them. We used fiction. We know many of them incorporated their own lived experience too, but it was not the goal. For us, fiction was a way to keep it experimental while still assessing risk.
ICA: What you are sharing speaks to the ethics of your artistic practice. I’m thinking about how even prisons have a form of ethics they subscribe to. The role of the communications spokesperson for the jail in these meetings, for example, illustrates the carceral ethics that the jail upholds. I’m asking about ethics in your artistic practice, both in Radioactive and more broadly, because I want to think more about the relationship between organizing and art. In organizing spaces, there is an investment in connection and the relationships that make the organizing possible, which you exhibit so beautifully in Radioactive. We do not always have the time to build those connections and relationships and when these connections happen, it is often through mutual experiences of scarcity, violence, emergency. These conditions motivate me to continue to build an ethos for organizing and art production that is aware of the un/intended consequences of experimentation and play, especially in the context of the prison.
How can we engage with art and artists to talk about these issues in a manner that will motivate audiences to join the cause? We are aware that the tactics we have been employing for the last two decades are not as effective as they once were. The circumstances of the time forced us to think creatively about new ways to name the conditions people were enduring. I see this moment of abolitionist visioning intimately tied to the arts. What role do you hope art will continue to play in these conversations? What is motivating your work now? I know you have also been doing a lot of work with repurposed materials from the demolition of a building at Cook County Jail. I’m thinking about the glass bars and wondering if you want to speak about that new work as well.
MG: I’m really worried about folks in Chicago, where there are a lot of undocumented people. I have DACA students. There is a lot of feeling of fear and precarity in the spaces I’m in and this is putting into question the fundamental values of art. I’m coming to terms with this by figuring out what my role is moving forward. How do I come through with the skills that I have and work in community with others? As someone who teaches art, I think art should be able to do all of it. It should be a painting on a wall or working with people in prison. I think it can do all those things, and it is important that it has that freedom. I’m interested in how the work moving forward is going to be addressing this political moment and work against what is to come.
I’ve been working on a music project, and it has me thinking about house music as the music of insurgency. I’m looking into music laws and noise ordinances in the US, Chicago, and in other countries to see how different governments have attempted to suppress certain types of dancing or music. I see this as an opportunity to connect what is specific to Chicago with larger discussions about mobility, movement, captivity, freedom, liberation, with a focus on Black and brown queer spaces. I would like to make work that brings us together. A space of insurgency and subversion embodied through dance, music, and being together. One of my goals as of now, is to make heavy bass music that gets your pelvis to move. I really want hip openers. How do I get the hips to move organically and release that part of the body. The center.
I don’t think about distribution much but recently I’m considering the potential for this new work as an LP, to tap into a much bigger audience than the typical art museum show. As someone who comes out of a public art practice, audience members could be anybody, the Tía down the street, local youth. I like the ability to create a space where many people can participate, dance, and move.
I’m also in the early stages of another project. I was a kind of death doula for my mother as she was dying, and it was a transformative experience. I recently did a performance at the park Armory in New York where I incorporated her costume jewelry. My mother was quite religious. She was very Catholic. I’m not, but there were things that I witnessed during that time that were very transcendent, and I have started to do work about it. It is not center stage, but it’s been important to process this part of my grief around her loss.
ICA: Thank you to Maria Gaspar for your incredible artistic contributions and for taking the time to make this conversation possible.
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Itzel Corona Aguilar