Printing Prisoners: Incarceration in Conversation at The Art Institute

Through windowed gates, gaunt “criminals” call out to each other. With a hunger to be heard, the subjects begin to converse.

This August, the Art Institute of Chicago debuted two exhibits which radically center incarceration. Situated across from each other in the contemporary wing, “Night/Crimes” and “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That Implies” appear to converse in their juxtaposition.

“Night/Crimes,” featuring early works by artist Charles Gaines, opened Aug. 16 and will run until Feb. 1. He started the collection in 1994, debuting the first work “Night/Crimes: Aries” in 1995. 

Signage next to the work explains how the pieces’ materials crisp gelatin silver prints and silk-screened text decorate the acrylic medium with a delicious structuralism. 

Curiously, the plaque discusses how the dates printed in silk-screen text could remind viewers of the Civil Rights Movement and the 1965 Watts Uprising in Los Angeles. The selection of highlighted dates and photographs is a key aspect of the project as Gaines’ compositions attempt to move the audience to draw a correlation between the images on his acrylic medium, even if there might be none. Still, his selections are intentional and subversive.

Throughout the exhibit, Gaines’ use of repetition to create meaning forces viewers to create a logic of empathy.

At first glance, every composition looks generally the same. The lower two-thirds of each piece depict an ink-black constellation while the upper third is split in half. A white rectangle with the location and date of a crime, the astronomical position of the pictured constellation and a date 50 years after the first sit on top of the constellation.

The numeric values act as a barrier between the cosmos and the two-to-three pictures of criminals, crime scenes and victims. 

The exhibition culminates in Gaines’ newest work, “Night/Crimes 2: Cassiopeia.” Created this year, the piece revisits the “Night/Crimes” project with eye-catching intensity. While the exhibit visually documents imprisonment and crime, it also conveys the suffocating experience of being deemed a criminal instead of a citizen. The suffocation comes from these silent yet frenetic images. They’re tensely held together on their medium without context.

Gaines took photos from the Chicago History Museum’s archives that capture Black men in the prison-industrial complex. 

In “Night/Crimes 2: Cassiopeia” cosmic imagery perfectly captures that suffocating feeling of dehumanization while the upper left picture depicts an empty and bloodied bed with a note above it. Macabrely, it reads, “For heavens sake//eaten me//before I Kill more//I cannot control myself.” The numbers, details and statistics with their small text, are composed to look pitiful against the gravitas of space. Constellations and the pictures of an imprisoned Black man contrast with the hastily scribbled text on the wall, and the miniscule text in the white space. 

The imagery carries an emotionally raw, contextual void that seems to enhance its horror. Each print of the man captures a frenetic energy that matches the repetitive numerals and scribbled lettering. Its visual rhythm has a sense of rage and cosmic misalignment, as if this man is being assigned blame for a crime with no relation to himself.

He is cast as a criminal in a cosmic play without justice.

Across the hall “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That Implies” screams for justice. It opened two weeks after Gaines’ exhibit Aug. 30 and will run through January. The Mexican American artist’s exhibit begins with her sensational prints and then offers a more physical experience with her sculpture and statuary. The museum-goer flows freely into the next gallery just across from it. The D.C. native’s exhibit picks up where Night/Crimes leaves off. 

Inside, viewers are greeted with a plaque stating, “Organized thematically and chronologically, this exhibition celebrates her abstract language of Black Pride, revolutionary change, artistic rigor, and the belief that everyday people deserve access to fine art.”

The audience viscerally experiences both the thematic and chronological curation as they pass through. The first room transitions into a narrow hallway with a timeline of Catlett’s life and achievements. Then, the audience is released into a massive gallery full of her organic sculpture and print work.

Through the glass doors on the one side, one can just barely make out “Night/Crimes.” The exhibit looms over the visitor’s back as they peruse the Howard University graduate’s prints on the opposite wall, seemingly arranged around the theme of her Mexican American dual-citizenship.

A plaque next to the prints clues into another theme both artists grapple with.

 “When she became a Mexican citizen in 1962, the US immediately deemed her an ‘undesirable alien,’” it reads.

As a result, Catlett was barred from entering the country.

These exhibits confront context directly, and their opening dates days after the declaration of emergency in Washington, D.C. reflect reality as much as they reflect each other. 

While both pieces are thematically similar, Catlett’s “Chile I” is also compositionally akin to Gaines’ work. The print depicts the faces of Black men behind bars while a figure seemingly writhes in agony at its center. With a predominantly ink black color scheme bisected by a large square of white, the piece strikes an analogous tune to “Night/Crimes: Cassiopeia”’s rectangular space.

But, the Hall of Mexican Fine Arts member’s similarities to Gaines don’t stop at “Chile I.” Catlett reused the piece’s design in combination with “Central American Says No” and “Chile II” to create a collage of three repeated prints. The composition of the superprint is astonishingly similar to “Night/Crimes: Cassiopeia” in how it layers squares of black with photos in movement. 

Repeated pictures, patterns and squares of both artworks create the sense that violence is repeated and universal. In her superprint, the predominant image is a man in military fatigue with hateful eyes and a dollar sign on his helmet. That kind of militarized surveillance forms the basis of what both artists critique.

Though Catlett’s superprint might be seen in an anti-imperialist Central American context, citizenship and racial profiling inform both exhibits.

Before his exhibit opened, Gaines asked an ensemble of seven musicians to present his “Manifestos 4.” This piece uses music and the extent of a gallery space to discuss the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision, which denied citizenship to people of African ancestry, again echoing Catlett’s identity-based discrimination.

As Gaines wonders what it feels like to be called a criminal in a carceral system, Catlett responds. She knows intimately what it’s like to be labeled a criminal and an “undesirable alien” And her answer is to fight against the systems of art, language, immigration, and justice she’s confined in.