Arts + Justice
Approaching justice from the perspective of arts and culture enables us to attend to its affective, embodied, social, and political dimensions, thus bringing together a range of cross-disciplinary dialogues.
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In June 2003, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh mounted an exhibition of Warhol's iconic Electric Chair print series—ten large-scale prints along with several smaller prints and paintings—as a catalyst to generate discourse on the issue of capital punishment. The project, Andy Warhol's Electric Chairs: Reflecting on Capital Punishment in America, which came two years after the execution of Timothy McVeigh and shortly after the decision by Illinois Governor George Ryan to commute all death sentences in that state, raised significant questions about the social utility and morality of the death penalty.
The only way to deconstruct a falsely fabricated prejudicial story is to tell a real one. So I turned to theatre.
The photographs they send are studio portraits taken by incarcerated photographers whose job in prison is to take pictures. Allen poses in these photographs sometimes with props, always in uniform. The backdrops are designed and painted by incarcerated people. They break up the uniformity and repetition of the prison attire and staged poses. There are also photographs from our visits to see Allen. In most of these, he stands in the center and we huddle around, hugging him as tightly as we can.
In this film, inmates are released from Huntsville State Penitentiary, taking in their first moments of freedom with phone calls, cigarettes, and quiet reflection at the Greyhound station up the block.
In the hands of filmmakers, executions were more than acts of retribution and incapacitation. They were opportunities for personal, and sometimes cultural, redemption.