Artists across disciplines have powerfully addressed incarceration through their work, using creativity as a means of critique and connection. Russell Craig's piece, to the left, exemplifies the realities of contending with the lack of care and harsh environment within prison spaces. Jesse Krimes, who created Apokaluptein:16389067 while serving a six-year prison sentence, transferred images from The New York Times onto prison bedsheets using hair gel and soap, assembling them into a massive mural that depicted both personal struggle and societal decay. Visual artist and activist Hank Willis Thomas explores the prison-industrial complex in projects like The Writing on the Wall, a collaboration with artist Baz Dreisinger that projects texts by incarcerated people onto public buildings around the world. These artists use their platforms to expose the lack of freedom and dehumanizing realities of incarceration, and to reimagine justice through empathy, storytelling, and collaboration.
We are honored to participate in the Fall of Freedom movement— a collective call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping the nation. Through creative imagination, expression, and solidarity, we support artists using the power of art to question, refuse, and resist.
Through this movement, we are choosing to highlight artists who use their practices to confront systems that deny freedom—the realities of mass incarceration by illuminating human stories, challenges of punishment, and the success of restorative justice. These artists expose how carceral systems shape lives and communities while revealing the creative resilience that persists within and beyond prison walls.
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In the fall of freedom
ancestors build a bridge
stand tall, stand free
stand tall with me
We are the light,
we are the sound
We are the ones turning it around!The Fall of Freedom
by Renée Benmeleh. Copyright 2025 -
Jared Owens
Ellapsium VJared Owens is a self-taught artist who creates work inspired by his 18 years of incarceration, using physical techniques like stamping, scraping, and pressing canvases against walls to reflect the realities of prison life. His art, which includes painting, sculpture, and installation, often incorporates materials from his time in prison, such as dirt and sand, to make connections between historic trauma like slavery and modern mass incarceration.
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Marcus Manganni
Bluest is based on architecturally identical windows found in American institutions, including Harvard and MXP Florence, a prison in Colorado. These institutions represent the broader structure of power and influence. The three sculptures highlight, expose, and blur our perception of the American value systems. By placing these windows in a gallery space —an arguably institutional space itself —Manganni is posing questions. What and who do we deem valuable? What do we invest in? What do we discard? What is our own role in the existing social systems? - End to End Burners What, at a distance, might appear to be an opulent Art Deco chandelier is actually a floor piece made up of 1,500 handmade toothbrush shivs and 1,500 crafted razor blades, created by Manganni, each representing bodies within a carceral tier structure. An act of subversion that serves as a reflection of hierarchies and systems of violence.
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Russell Craig
Three is a Crowd/The Death of Maurice -
Sara Bennett
From the Looking Inside and The Bed Project SeriesLinda, 70, in the rec room for the medically unemployed at Taconic Correctional Facility (2019)
Linda, 74, in a transitional house she shares with 7 other women, six weeks after her release. Queens, NY (2022)
Sentenced to 30 years to life, Linda was released in October 2022, after 30 years of incarceration.Sara Bennett, a 2024 Guggenheim fellow, is a former public defender who primarily photographs women with life sentences, both inside and outside prison, as a way to draw attention to the problems of mass incarceration. Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. She is the 2023 Emerging Laureate of the International Women in Photo Association. -
