Maria Gaspar’s Abolitionist Dreams Permeate ‘Compositions,’ Latinx Project NYU
[2024] Article by Michael De Anda Muñiz. “These two components of Gaspar’s background serve as an important contextualization for her newest and first West Coast solo exhibition, Compositions, currently on view until March 2 at the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS). As part of Visualizing Abolition—an initiative supporting art, research, and programming committed to creating a world without prisons—the exhibition features new and existing works that call into question the role, consequences, and permanence of carceral institutions through painting, sculpture, video, performance, and public art. Compositions accomplishes two important abolitionist goals. First, it rejects the inevitability of prisons and jails. Second, it emphasizes the importance of collective imagination for building a freer future.”
Elena and Samora Pinderhughes Performance Maria Gaspar Compositions’ “We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat”
In conjunction with Compositions, on view at the IAS, Maria Gaspar’s sculptural renderings of the jail’s fragments have been sonically and visually activated through performances over the course of the exhibition as part of Gaspar’s work We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat. These events 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. This event is by invitation only.
This February 6th 2024, join us for a live performance by acclaimed musicians Elena and Samora Pinderhughes who 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. Learn more here.
Solo Exhibition: Compositions at Institute for Arts and Sciences, Santa Cruz, California
Iron bars recast as glass with sonic reverberations. Concrete walls made porous by precisely cut holes. A building disappearing into clouds, piece by piece. In Compositions, Chicago-based artist Maria Gaspar’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast, artworks are acts of alchemy. And video footage and debris salvaged from the demolition of a wing of the Cook County Department of Corrections, the largest single-site jail in the United States, becomes the material with which to build a liberated world.
Compositions features newly commissioned and existing works from the award-winning artist. From public actions, sound broadcasts, sculptures, paintings, to videos, for more than a decade Gaspar has explored the role of art within the collective struggle against the United States carceral system. The exhibition is organized as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to contribute to the unfolding collective story and alternative imagining underway to create a future free of prisons. Exhibitions runs from September 26, 2023 - March 3, 2024.
Force of Things: In Conversation with artist Maria Gaspar and Live Performance by James Gordon Williams
[2023] Join us on June 21, 2023, @ 6 pm at El Museo Del Barrio (NYC) as Maria Gaspar presents her artistic practice as well as a live performance by James Gordon Williams as an accompaniment to Gaspar’s installation Force of Things, a commission for Something Beautiful: Reframing La Colleccíon. As part of Gaspar’s ongoing investigations of carcerality, presence, and penal matter, the sonic improvisation attempts to transfigure materials that confine into materials that liberate. The audience is invited to witness how jail debris (bars collected from the Cook County of Corrections in Chicago) can be released through touch and vibrations. Something Beautiful: Reframing La Coleccíon will be open to the public from 4-6 pm. Free Admission | To RSVP, click here.
Xican–a.o.x. Body at The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture
[2023] Xican–a.o.x. Body adds complexity to understandings of Chicano art and culture by exploring the visual practices that foreground the body as the site in which imagination and political enunciation are articulated. The artists featured in the exhibition celebrate the creativity of decolonized political personas that are playful, unapologetic, and irreverent. These multidisciplinary perspectives erase any presumed hierarchy between popular art and what has traditionally been thought of as “high art.” Simultaneously, Xican–a.o.x. Body’s artists embed conceptual and intellectual aspects through their aesthetics and the materiality of their artwork. Artists in Xican–a.o.x. Body include: Laura Aguilar, Celia Álvarez Muñoz, Asco (Harry Gamboa Jr., Glugio Gronk Nicandro, Willie Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez, 1972–82), Mario Ayala, Judith F. Baca, Alice Bag, Julia Barbosa Landois, Ariana Brown, Nao Bustamante, William Camargo, Barbara Carrasco, Charlie Cartwright (Good Time Charlie), Mel Casas, Isabel Castro, Yreina D. Cervántez, Enrique Chagoya, Artemisa Clark, Liz Cohen, Adriana Corral, Camilo Cruz, Cyclona, Ms. Vaginal Davis, Albert De Alba Sr., Sandra de la Loza, Natalie Diaz with Mohammed Hammad, Alex Donis, Frances Salomé España, rafa esparza, Justin Favela, Christina Fernandez, Diane Gamboa, Maria Gaspar, Jay Lynn Gomez, Ken Gonzales-Day, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Fabian Guerrero, Ester Hernandez, Sebastian Hernandez, Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Salomón Huerta, Luis Jiménez, Alma López, Yolanda López, Richard A. Lou, James Luna, Narsiso Martinez, Patrick Martinez, Delilah Montoya, Malaquias Montoya, Chuco Moreno, Gabriela Muñoz, Marcos Raya, Sandy Rodriguez, Gabriela Ruiz, Sylvia Salazar Simpson, Shizu Saldamando, Teddy Sandoval, Tamara Santibañez, The Q-Sides (Vero Majano, Amy Martinez, and Kari Orvik), Walter Thompson-Hernández, John M. Valadez, Patssi Valdez, Linda Vallejo, Ricardo Valverde, Kathy Vargas, and José Villalobos.
Graham Foundation Grant
[2023] The Graham Foundation is honored to announce the award of 64 new grants to individuals working to realize innovative and interdisciplinary ideas that contribute critical perspectives on architecture and design. Selected from approximately 500 submissions, the funded projects include publications, research, exhibitions, films, podcasts, digital initiatives, public programs and other formats that further ideas, discussions, and new understandings of architecture. The funded projects are led by 92 individuals that include established and emerging architects, artists, curators, designers, filmmakers, historians, and writers, based in cities such as Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Ahmedabad, India; Bandung, Indonesia; Beirut, Lebanon; Buenos Aires, Argentina; New York, NY; Paris, France; Oklahoma City, OK; Porto, Portugal; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and Chicago, IL where the Graham Foundation is based. Artist Maria Gaspar is awarded for her experimental video/performance titled “I Believe In The Things You Cannot See,” which focuses on life and living against the backdrop of a carceral demolition in her childhood neighborhood of Chicago.
Force of Things as part of Something Beautiful: Reframing La Coleccíon at El Museo Del Barrio
[2023] El Museo del Barrio is pleased to present Something Beautiful: Reframing La Colección, the Museum's most ambitious presentation of its unique, complex, and culturally diverse Permanent Collection in over two decades. Organized by Rodrigo Moura, Chief Curator; Susanna V. Temkin, Curator; and Lee Sessions, Permanent Collection Associate Curator, the exhibition will present approximately 500 artworks, including new acquisitions and artist commissions, through rotating displays over the course of one year. As part of the exhibition, Maria Gaspar presents a new body of work. The demolition of a detention facility is the central component of her presentation in Room 110, commissioned to respond to the multiple urban narratives found throughout Something Beautiful. The extended passage of time in this large-scale projection reflects on how the city is perceived from inside and outside the prison, while the ultimate destruction of the building suggests the need for realized abolition. The accompanying sculptural and photographic installations were created from debris salvaged from the site. Their open-ended configurations transform these charged materials into both mementos and poetic construction elements to build a more just future. “Force of Things” runs from May 18 to August 20, 2023.
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
[2023] The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture will be the next destination for the acclaimed exhibition, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood. Marking Time explores the impact of the US prison system on contemporary visual art. This exhibition, presented across three galleries —Latimer, Exhibition Hall, and Media Gallery— highlights artists who are or have been incarcerated, alongside artists who have not been incarcerated but whose practices expose aspects of the carceral state. Seen together, their works reveal how punitive governance, predatory policing, surveillance, and mass imprisonment impact millions of people. More than 30 artists appear in Marking Time, including Jared Owens, George Anthony Morton, Gwendolyn Garth, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, Russell Craig, Mark Loughney, Gilberto Rivera, Sable Elyse Smith, Maria Gaspar, and Larry Cook. Exhibition runs from May 1 to December 4, 2023.
No Justice Without Love at the Ford Foundation Gallery
[2023] No Justice Without Love brings together the transformational work of artists, activists, and allied donors who make up the Art for Justice Fund (A4J) community. The exhibition is an invitation to engage with the Fund's mission to change the narrative around mass incarceration and disrupt the criminal justice system. Inaugurated in 2017 under the unprecedented philanthropic vision of Agnes Gund, A4J launched with $100M generated from the sale of Agnes’ favorite painting, Roy Lichtenstein's Masterpiece. This spurred artists, collectors, and supporters to donate an additional $25M to the Fund, which advances policy reform, shifts public narratives on criminal justice, and promotes the leadership of formerly incarcerated people while centering art as a catalyst to propel change. Exhibition runs from April 4 to June 30, 2023.
The Artists Taking on Mass Incarceration, New York Times
[2022] Maria Gaspar, Sable Elyse Smith, Hank Willis Thomas, Titus Kaphar, and many other artists are featured in the New York Times Arts and Letters section by writer, Adam Bradley. August 11.
Latinx Artist Fellowship
[2022] Our country’s Latinx artists—creatives of Latin American or Caribbean descent who live and work in the US—have made significant and vital contributions to American culture. Designed to address this systemic and longstanding lack of support, and now in its second year, the Latinx Artist Fellowship is awarding $50,000 each to a multigenerational cohort of 15 Latinx visual artists, each year for an initial commitment of five years. Administered by the US Latinx Forum in collaboration with the New York Foundation for the Arts and supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation, this award is the first significant prize of its kind and celebrates the plurality and diversity of Latinx artists and aesthetics. The 2022 Fellowship class was chosen to reflect the diversity that exists within the Latinx community, highlighting the practices of women-identified, queer, and non-binary artists, as well as those from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, ranging from Chicanx and Ecuadorian-American to Afro-Cuban and Indigenous.
Guggenheim Fellowship
[2022] On April 7, 2022, the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation approved the awarding of Guggenheim Fellowships to a diverse group of 180 exceptional individuals, including artist Maria Gaspar. Chosen from a rigorous application and peer review process out of almost 2500 applicants, these successful applicants were appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise. “Now that the past two years are hopefully behind all of us, it is a special joy to celebrate the Guggenheim Foundation’s new class of Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “This year marks the Foundation’s 97th annual Fellowship competition. Our long experience tells us what an impact these annual grants will have to change people’s lives. The work supported by the Foundation will aid in our collective effort to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. It is an honor for the Foundation to help the Fellows carry out their visionary work.” In all, 51 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 81 different academic institutions, 31 states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 33 to 75. Close to 60 Fellows have no full-time college or university affiliation. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to issues like climate change, pandemics, Russia, feminism, identity, and racism.
Building Radical Soil at the Latinx Project at New York University
[2022] Building Radical Soil highlights the works of Nyugen E. Smith, Maria Gaspar, Michelle Hernandez Vega, Koyoltzintli, Glendalys Medina, Carlos Rosales Silva, Lina Puerta, Justin Sterling, and Cinthya Santos Briones. Together the artists examine urgent issues that include extractive economies, environmental racism, and colonial settlement through the evaluation of ancestral, intergenerational, and community knowledge. They move us to appreciate the interrelatedness of our everyday lives and the environment. Proposing that identity is intrinsically integrated with land-- the land we are on and the land we come from, the exhibition explores belonging, power structures, and climate adversities. Many communities are affected by environmental catastrophe, leading to inequity and mass migrations. In response, some of the artists suggest an investment in ritual, myth, and language. Through performance, participation, field research, and activism– others reveal the invisible power structures that shape our world. All nine artists foster an understanding of home as an extension of the body-land relationship, questioning what forms of ecological caring we’re reclaiming, and what roles art/ists play in the planning of our future. The title draws from Aurora Levin Morales' famous essay, which is a call to consider the environment as an entry point into powerful lineages of resilience and communal preservation.
Marking Time at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
[2022] Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration explores the impact of the US prison system through contemporary visual art. Through the work of artists who are or have been incarcerated alongside artists who have not, the exhibition reveals how punitive governance, predatory policing, surveillance and mass imprisonment impacts millions of people. Marking Time features work by over 30 artists, including Ohio-based artists Dean Gillispie, Tameca Cole, Larry Cook, Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Maria Gaspar, Ronnie Goodman, James “Yaya” Hough, Mark Loughney and Sable Elyse Smith. Additional artists include American Artist, Cedar Annenkova, Sara Bennett, Conor Broderick, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, Daniel McCarthy Clifford, Russell Craig, Halim Flowers, Gary Harrell, Ashley Hunt, Jesse Krimes, Susan Lee-Chun, William B. Livingston III, Ojore Lutalo, George Anthony Morton, Jesse Osmun, Jared Owens, Rowan Renee, Gilberto Rivera, Billy Sell, James Sepesi, Todd (Hyung-Rae) Tarselli, Jerome Washington and Aimee Wissman.
The exhibition is organized by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture and Communications at NYU, and reflects her decade-long commitment to the research of and programming on the visual art and culture of mass incarceration. The exhibition follows the release of Dr. Fleetwood’s award-winning book, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press, 2020), recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. The exhibition debuted at MoMA PS1 in September 2020.
Frieze Los Angeles Exhibition
[2022] The winners of the inaugural Frieze Impact Prize — which recognizes three artists for creating work that contributes to the movement to end mass incarceration in the United States — Dread Scott, Mary Baxter and Maria Gaspar exhibited their projects at Frieze LA. The prize, given in partnership with Art for Justice and Endeavor Impact, brings attention to inequity in mass incarceration and the US prison system.
El Museo Looks to Define ‘Latinx Art’ With a Major Survey
[2021] Maria Gaspar, Luis Flores, Cándida Álvarez, Patrick Martinez, and many others who exhibited at El Museo Del Barrio’s exhibition, Estamos Bien - La Trienal 20/21 are featured in the New York Times Letters section by writer, Holland Cotter. March 26.
Frieze Impact Prize
[2021] The winners of the inaugural Frieze Impact Prize — which recognizes three artists for creating work that contributes to the movement to end mass incarceration in the United States — were announced on Wednesday, with Dread Scott, Mary Baxter and Maria Gaspar each being awarded $25,000 for their artwork. The prize, given in partnership with Art for Justice and Endeavor Impact, was selected by a jury including Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel, founder of Art for Justice Fund Agnes Gund, Serpentine Galleries CEO Bettina Korek and chief curator and deputy director of curatorial and collections for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Pilar Tompkins Rivas. The Frieze Impact Prize aims to expose the inequitable aspects of the criminal justice system and challenge its racially-biased public perceptions. Applications to the Frieze Impact Prize were open to U.S. based visual artists aged 18 or older, regardless of citizenship status, felony convictions, or formal training in art, with special consideration given to justice-involved artists.
United States Artists Fellowship
[2021] At a moment of constant change, artists continue to inspire curiosity, empathy, and action toward building a more honest and just world. The 2021 USA Fellows, including Maria Gaspar, were chosen for their bold artistic vision and significant impact. Each artist demonstrates generosity and care toward field-building that continues to inspire and propel their discipline. These artists break disciplinary boundaries to challenge the status quo. Some are shapemakers—trailblazers and innovators who invite us to stretch our imaginations and see new possibilities in materials, form, and process. Others are storytellers who center that which has been forgotten, misrepresented, or untold by others. There are the culture bearers who recognize the importance of retaining ancestral knowledge and passing down their heritage to future generations. And, the movement builders who work in partnership with others to redefine community engagement, kinship, and activism. This cohort shows us that art-making of all kinds and their cross-pollination is critical to moving our culture forward.
Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect (Chicago: Green Lantern Press, 2021)
[2021] Gaspar’s project, City As Site, is presented in Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect as an ephemeral tribute in conversation with the social mores of Chicago's Wall of Respect, a 1967 public art work which included a mural of black heroes and heroines in areas such as music, art, literature, and politics. The publication, conceived and edited by Romi Crawford, compiles and constructs new monuments that mark a revised list of historical events, places, people, in decidedly un-monumental ways.
In Plain Sight Nationwide Artist Intervention
[2020] Gaspar was invited to write in the sky for In Plain Sight, a nationwide artist-led intervention dedicated to abolishing immigrant detention and the dismantling of the United States culture of incarceration. In partnership with immigrant advocacy organizations, In Plain Sight sent messages written by over 70 artists above 80 ICE detention centers on July 3-5, 2020. Visual and performance artists Cassils and rafa esparza invited Maria to present a text-based work to be sky written above the Coastal Bend Detention Center in Robstown, TX. Gaspar chose text based on a song; “Soy Pan, Soy Paz, Soy Más” popularized by Mercedes Sosa with Piero. The message was directed to the majority of those incarcerated and living around the facility— Spanish speakers. The lyrics are a message of love, and hold in mind the tenderness of people, migrants, seeking to find some hope but are placed in limbo - exploited and traumatized by the US government. In Plain Sight culminated over “Independence Day” weekend in a spectacular performance to expose the detention camps that are hiding “in plain sight” to the American public.
Marking Time: Art in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020]
[2020] Gaspar’s ongoing work surrounding issues of mass incarceration is profiled in Marking Time, a book on artwork developed in the confines of jails and prisons. Gaspar’s projects Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall and 96 Acres are featured in this study of art against incarceration. Written by Professor Nicole Fleetwood, Marking Time documents how the incarcerated are driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them by turning ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions—including solitary confinement—these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender. Their bold works, many of which are being published for the first time in this volume, have opened new possibilities in American art.
LatinX Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics (London: Duke University Press, 2020)
[2020] Gaspar’s practice is highlighted in LatinX Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics. LatinX Art, by Arlene Davila, is at once an introduction to contemporary Latinx art and a call to decolonize the art worlds and practices that erase and whitewash Latinx artists. Drawing on interviews with artists, curators, and dealers, Dávila shows the importance of race, class, and nationalism in shaping contemporary art markets while providing a path for scrutinizing art and culture institutions and for diversifying the art world.
You Are An Artist (London: Penguin Books, 2020)
[2020] Gaspar is featured in the publication titled You Are an Artist, curated by Sarah Urist Green. The book builds on the television series “The Art Assignment” that originally aired on PBS and is a collection of more than 50 assignments gathered from some of the most innovative artists working today. Sarah Urist Green met with a diverse range of artists, asking them to share prompts that relate to their own ways of working. Gaspar drew upon her site intervention titled Body in Place to develop a prompt using the body as a compass to engage with the architecture of our surroundings.
Art For Justice Fund Award
[2018] The Art for Justice Fund, which was launched by philanthropist and collector Agnes Gund last year, announced today that it is awarding almost $10 million to thirty-eight recipients in its second round of grants. Working to advance criminal justice reform in the United States, Gund auctioned off a prized work by Roy Lichtenstein in January 2017 and used $100 million of the proceeds to jump-start the initiative. The grants will support organizations working to end cash-bail practices that discriminate against people from low-income communities, provide resources to groups advocating to close youth prisons, expand higher education programs for people who are incarcerated, create leadership training programs for children whose parents are behind bars, and educate the public on the need for criminal-justice reforms. Among those receiving support are the Imagining Justice grantees, who are creating work that “elevates ideas and stories about the injustice and inequity of mass incarceration, such as artist, Maria Gaspar.
Art Matters Foundation Fellowship Grant
(2017) Art Matters is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2017 grants to individual artists, that includes Maria Gaspar. The foundation awarded 22 fellowships for ongoing work that breaks ground aesthetically and socially. In announcing the grants, Art Matters Director Sacha Yanow said, “We are thrilled to support this extraordinary group of artists from across the US. A diverse and expansive range of contemporary practice within various geographic and cultural contexts, their work engages justice and liberation issues and experiments with form. We feel their voices are important and through our funding, we hope to help amplify them.”
Headlands Center for the Arts Chamberlain Award
(2017) The Chamberlain Award is a fully sponsored artist residency and cash prize at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sauasalito, CA designed to support an artist who displays exceptional merit working in the discipline of social practice. While at Headlands, Gaspar will be researching and developing an artist book that delves into issues of walls as dividers, separators, and barriers. Through writing, sound, and drawing, the book will bring together her community-based practices around contested geographies, power, and spatial justice, especially at a time of heightened xenophobia, anti blackness, and mass incarceration.
William Bronson and Grayce Slovett Mitchell Award
(2017) The William Bronson Mitchell and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Enhancement Fund offers competitive awards to one or more faculty members at The School of the Art Institute who have received a major national or international award. The grantees are selected for the purpose of expanding upon the work for which their major award was granted.
Robert Rauschenberg Artist As Activist Fellowship
(2016) Maria Gaspar will produce RADIOACTIVE: Stories from Beyond the Wall, a series of radio broadcasts and visual projections on the largest jail in the country–Cook County Jail in Chicago. Through connecting those who live outside its walls with those on the “inside,” the project aims to dissolve, transgress, and collectively reimagine the brutal 96-acre division.