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Mark Loughney: Pyrrhic Defeat: A Visual Study of Mass Incarceration
Presented in collaboration with Mural Arts Philadelphia. This portrait series humanizes incarcerated individuals, shedding light on the immense human cost of mass incarceration in America. Created during Mark Loughney's ten years of incarceration, these portraits offer a dignified, intimate view of his fellow prisoners, challenging the stigmatizing image of those within the prison system.
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Mark Menjivar: DLP Mirror
Through a multi-channel sound and architectural installation, the artist explores the story of David Lee Powell and the musical score he composed while incarcerated on death row.
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Linda Bond: Deadly Weapons
A cell floor carpeted in Mylar blankets, a curtain of knotted shoelaces, and a blanket woven with multicolored shoelaces and Mylar strips reference the experiences of immigrants detained at the U.S. – Mexico border.
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Ann Reichlin: Transient Room
A reflective plane installed in a cell explores the contradictions inherent in Eastern State’s architecture and historic practices.
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Alex Rosenberg: A Climber’s Guide to Eastern State Penitentiary or, Eastern State’s Architecture, and How to Escape It
Artist Alexander Rosenberg brings Eastern State’s history of preservation into conversation with the curiously overlapping story of American climbing. In 1971, Eastern State Penitentiary closed; at the same time, the concept of “clean climbing” was gaining traction in the worldwide climbing community.
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Dehanza Rogers: #BlackGirlhood
Filmmaker Dehanza Rogers’ video projection, commissioned by Eastern State Penitentiary, explores the criminalization of Black girlhood. We observe the struggles of three Black girls as they navigate authority and policing in the classroom. The filmmaker says her work illustrates, in part, the school to prison pipeline and the sexual abuse to prison pipeline.
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Solitary Watch with Jean Casella, Jeanine Oleson and Laurie Jo Reynolds: Photo Requests from Solitary
This ongoing project invites people in long-term solitary confinement in U.S. prisons to request a photograph of anything at all, real or imagined, and then finds volunteers to make that image. This Eastern State Penitentiary installation features astonishing new requests from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and range of photographs made for the project. Visitors are invited to fulfill requests by uploading their own images to www.PhotoRequestsFromSolitary.org.
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Rachel Livedalen: Doris Jean
The artist applied removable vinyl lettering and images on the glass panes of Eastern State’s greenhouse.
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Provisional Island: An Electric Kite
The artist collective Provisional Island installed a handmade radio transmitter in one cell that transmits to portable radios in the cell directly opposite. The broadcast is comprised of fragments culled from radio broadcasts and historic radio shows created in prisons and internment camps, and highlights the role of radio in subverting and transcending prison walls.
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Michelle Handelman: Beware the Lily Law
The piece uses the 1969 Stonewall Riots as a starting point to address issues facing gay and transgender prisoners.
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Tyler Held: Identity Control
Reflecting on the idea that a man is “too easily reduced to an object” when institutionalized, artist Tyler Held uses a car, stripped inside a cell, as a metaphor for relinquished individuality.
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Jesse Krimes: Apokaluptein16389067:II
The piece reflects the artist’s personal experience while incarcerated in federal prison, where he created a 39-panel surreal landscape on bed sheets and mailed each piece home. His installation at Eastern State modifies this massive image to cover the interior walls of an abandoned cell.
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Jess Perlitz: Chorus
The artist asked incarcerated men and women from throughout the United States, “If you could sing one song, and have that song heard, what would it be?” Her recordings are played inside a cell at Eastern State. In the resulting “choir,” triggered by the visitor’s arrival, these voices are layered, escalating, colliding, and eventually grow overwhelming.
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Cindy Stockton Moore: Other Absences
These 50 portraits represent individuals murdered by men and women who would eventually be sent to Eastern State Penitentiary.
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William Cromar: GTMO
This cell is a recreation of a cell from Camp X-Ray, the now-abandoned holding cells in the United States Federal Detention Center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Department of Defense replaced the Camp X-Ray cells with newer holding cells, called Camp Delta, in 2002.
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Greg Cowper: Specimen
The artist drew his inspiration from the collection of eighteen species of butterflies and moths — some quite rare — gathered by an Eastern State Penitentiary prisoner living in solitary confinement.
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