Maria Gaspar Artist Talk and Performance with Special Guest James Gordon Williams

In conjunction with Compositions, on view at the IAS, Maria Gaspar’s sculptural renderings of the jail’s fragments will be sonically and visually activated through performances over the course of the exhibition. These events will periodically make present the histories of people so often occluded by carceral structures and suggest new modes of transforming the wreckage of the present through art. 

Join us on October 7 for a talk in which Gaspar will present her artistic practice as well as a live performance from the acclaimed composer and theorist James Gordon Williams, assistant professor of music at UC Santa Cruz. Williams will perform an improvised musical piece using sculptures made from the fragments of the Cook County Jail. This sprawling space of imprisonment covers ninety-six acres on Chicago’s West Side and is one of the largest concentrations of incarcerated people in the country. Long a subject of Gaspar’s work, it was the site of a series of community-engaged art projects from 2012-2016.