Abolition Then and Now w/ Isaac Julien and Robin D.G. Kelley

Abolition Then & Now with historian & cultural theorist Robin D. G. Kelley & artist & filmmaker Isaac Julien, co-presented with McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, is the next event in Visualizing Abolition.

Abolition Then & Now features Robin Kelley and Isaac Julien in conversation about the anti-slavery movements of the eighteenth & nineteenth centuries & current abolitionist uprisings against racist police brutality & the prison industrial complex. This event coincides with the presentation of Julien's Lessons of the Hour, 2019, a ten-screen film installation that explores the legacy of Frederick Douglass & his vision for abolition in relationship to contemporaneity, at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts.

For the 2020/21 academic year, UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Dent, feminist studies, has organized a year-long series of online events featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium, bringing together artists, lawyers, scholars, and other thinkers to challenge the dominant ways people see and understand issues of mass incarceration, detention, and policing in the United States and beyond.

The events of Visualizing Abolition accompany Barring Freedom, a bi-coastal exhibition of art featuring Sonya Clark, American Artist, Dread Scott, Deana Lawson, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, Sharon Daniel, Sanford Biggers, and other artists whose practices creatively confront the failure of many to see the racist biases within the criminal justice system or to comprehend the economic and social problems that the system serves to obscure. Barring Freedom will be on view at San José Museum of Art October 23-March 21, 2021 and at UC Santa Cruz Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery January 12-March 21, 2021. It travels to NYC John Jay College of Criminal Justice April 28-July 15, 2021.