Award-winning Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Maria Gaspar will visit Kenyon’s campus March 20-21 to present a creative workshop on the topic of prison abolition.

Join us to contribute hands-on to Gaspar’s ongoing Disappearance Jail project and join a conversation facilitated by The Gund’s Director and Chief Curator, Daisy Desrosiers, about the artist’s participation in No Justice Without Love, on view through April 13, 2024 and initially developed by Desrosiers for The Ford Foundation. New Orleans-based artist and abolitionist jackie sumell's “abolitionist punch” will be served.

Disappearance Jail is an archive of more than 400 images of jails, prisons, and detention centers across the US. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gaspar started carefully perforating the images with a hole punch to “remove” the institutions. For her visit in March, The Gund commissioned Gaspar to produce a series of images featuring carceral system facilities in Ohio. During this workshop, you will be invited to “disappear” or “undo” facilities by perforating them.

Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist whose work addresses issues at the intersection of social justice and physical spaces. She aims to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Her work spans formats and durations, including sound performances at a military site in New Haven (Sounds for Liberation); long-term public art interventions at the largest jail in the country (96 Acres Project, Chicago); appropriations of museum archives (Brown Brilliance Darkness Matter); and audio-video works, marking a jail located in her childhood neighborhood (On the Border of What is Formless and Monstrous). Gaspar has received the Guggenheim Award for Creative Arts, Latinx Artist Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, the Frieze Impact Prize, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts.