How Are We Free?
Organized by Layne Mullett and Emily Abendroth of LifeLines: Voices Against the Other Death Penalty
Friday, September 6, 2019 – Sunday, October 13, 2019
Presented in The Front Space
About the Exhibition
How Are We Free? is a visual art exhibit that explores the nature of freedom and confinement through creative collaboration between people who have been sentenced to die in prison and visual artists outside the prison walls. Visual economies and regimes of power have been massively employed by the state and the media in order to criminalize people. This exhibit interrupts those regimes and instead invites viewers to investigate what actually creates conditions for safety, healing, justice, transformation, and liberation.
How Are We Free? was produced by LifeLines: Voices Against the Other Death Penalty. LifeLines is a media project conducted across the prison walls to highlight the voices and analysis of those serving Death By Incarceration sentences, more commonly known as Life Without Parole.
How Are We Free? includes artwork by Makeba Rainey (Philadelphia), Noelle Lorraine Williams (New Jersey), Matice Moore (Baltimore), Alma Sheppard-Matsuo (Philadelphia), Gb Kim (Brooklyn), Robin Markle (Philadelphia), and Kate DeCiccio (Washington DC). Their collaborators on the inside are Clinton “Nkechi” Walker, Terri Harper, Felix “Phill” Rosado, Avis Lee, David “Dawud” Lee, Marie “Mechie” Scott and Charles Boyd.
LifeLines: How Are We Free? is presented by Vox Populi’s Community Engagement Committee as part of an ongoing series dedicated to supporting the artwork and activism of grassroots social-justice organizations and other community groups in Philadelphia.
About the Organizers
LifeLines is a media/cultural project conducted in extensive, long-term collaboration with eight people serving Life Sentences Without Parole or Death By Incarceration sentences in Pennsylvania. The project uses interviews, creative media interventions, and sound installations to support an emerging statewide campaign to abolish Death By Incarceration. We use the term “LifeLines” to refer to the fact that this project highlights the stories and analysis of those serving life/death sentences and to point toward the many collective relationships and infrastructures of support (familial, community, activist, and beyond) that are forged in resistance to mass imprisonment.
More Info: lifelines-project.org