Maria Gaspar On Abolition and the High Stakes of Working with Incarcerated Communities — Colossal

Having grown up in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, where Cook County Department of Corrections sprawls across 96 acres, Maria Gaspar has always felt the haunting presence of detention. As a child, she visited that jail as part of a Scared Straight program and, through the years, became more involved in conversations about mass incarceration, abolition, and spatial justice.

Both an educator and practicing artist, Gaspar has put collaboration, compassion, and critical thinking at the center of her work. At the School of the Art Institute, she teaches students to develop interdisciplinary, research-based approaches to art making. Outside the classroom, she strives to engage communities that might not otherwise be brought into the creative act, whether that be local teens and their families, activists, or people trapped inside the carceral system.

Following a studio visit last fall, Gaspar and I met virtually in May to discuss her practice and Disappearance Jail, an iteration of which we would be working on together for No One Knows All It Takes at the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee. In this conversation, we consider the necessity of care in collaboration, the possibilities of abolition, and how healing is always political.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Grace: Can you take us back to the beginning of Disappearance Jail? What was the impetus for that project?

Maria: When I began the project, it was the height of the pandemic. I had already spent a number of years working in prisons and with incarcerated people. I had just had my child, and I was unable to return to Cook County Jail to teach a series of workshops due to the jail being a COVID hotspot. I was trying to figure out what to do, how to respond to the moment, and was mostly at home. I wasn’t able to get to my studio at the time.

I was thinking a lot about ways of making this static and rigid place more porous through materiality. I’ve done it in various ways, including performance and installation, as well as other kinds of site interventions. But I was curious to see what it would look like, materially, using a photograph. I took to my home printer and started printing out images of Cook County Jail I had taken over the years. I continued to print out photographs of all Illinois prisons. Using materials I had around me, I began experimenting with types of perforations. I cut them into pieces, much like an erasure poem. I tore them, and I hole punched them

At the time, I performed a piece where I cut up text from the jail’s website and then pieced it back together like a concrete poem. It may have happened at the same time when I was working with paper and cutting things up that I then took to my hole puncher and started hole punching this iconic image I took of the jail in relation to a major thoroughfare—26th Street in Little Village. I’ve gone back to that photo many times.

That led to the current project, where I am making porous all images of jails, prisons, and detention centers in the United States. Visually, I was playing with the shadow of the scanned punched-out image and noticed how the gaps started to take on their own form. I liked how that looked, and then I kept doing it.

Grace: Is the project related to Disappearance Suits, or do they just share a name?

Maria: There’s a connection. I’m interested in the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of places like jails and people and bodies, the way people are extracted from communities and put into prisons. It’s an ongoing project, but when I first started it, it was about examining the way brown appears in various spaces. It was certainly talking about a political identity and a racialized body.

For me, it connects to the ways jails and prisons function and erase predominantly Black and Brown or poor communities. There’s a relationship, and I was very conscious of that title, of reusing it or applying it to the perforated images of jails. It’s interlinked in my mind, separate projects, but linked in many ways.

Grace: Invisibility is something that I wanted to talk about in relation to the exhibition at the Haggerty Museum. One of the things we’re thinking about with that show is the ways we societally conceal problems, particularly issues like addiction, trauma, and mental illness, all of which can push people to the margins without care.

This invisibility, coupled with the belief that people who have committed crimes deserve whatever punishment comes to them, seems to lead to the idea that people who are incarcerated are less than human. I’m curious, as an artist working with incarcerated people, how you ensure that people are able to show their full selves?

Maria: As a society, we normalize the way we mistreat people in the criminal legal system. This idea that they’re less than is felt not only within the carceral boundaries but beyond. It’s felt when you’re thinking about people from a lower economic status or a racialized group or some other marginalized identity. So the carceral aspect is just one part of it. Like you’re pointing out, it’s a bigger systemic issue. 

Working with incarcerated communities or about incarceration is high-stakes work. It’s quite different from what an artist is doing in their studio with a discrete object. I teach at an art school, so I think a lot about how we’re educating younger artists, especially those interested in activist or community-based practices, particularly if they’re not coming from or don’t have experience in that space.

In my experience, community-based work with incarcerated communities is both tender and political. It often involves a group of people who may be different from what we are accustomed to within a very white and homogeneous artistic environment.  This work means that you might be in meetings with the sheriff’s department or with violence prevention workers. There is a system that is uniquely different from the art school or museum context. 

Therefore, as an artist, I believe one must be thoughtful and open to collaborating with diverse groups of people, but it also needs to include a power analysis. Within those groups of people are different kinds of power structures and hierarchies. Navigating between these various systems is quite challenging and sometimes disorienting. At the end of the day, one has to really think about what the core values are. What is the intention behind the work? What is most important, and how do you make sure that as you’re navigating through these spaces, you’re not compromising the work and what the work means, and that you’re not compromising the lives of people who are in the most vulnerable state, which are the people behind the cages? That’s one piece, remembering that you can’t just take a risk out of whimsy. You have to remember that you’re dealing with people’s lives and lived experiences, and it must be with utmost care.

I also value the ways in which artists can be subversive, the way they can be wild and wacky, audacious, and joyful. Artists are not always taking the preconceived pathway. We’re often pushing those boundaries. And so I also want to honor the creativity and creative capacity and possibility that not only I hold but that my collaborators hold. How do I create the conditions within a community-based practice that feels creative, even within the limitations, even within the precarities? How do we recognize those limitations and precarities and move forward? How do we work together while also finding ways to flourish and nourish ourselves within a creative environment? Those two things aren’t always compatible, right? Captivity and creativity, or the freedom to be creative, work against each other. They’re meant to be in conflict.

But we have seen artists who are incarcerated supercede their environment. I love how people like Dr. Nicole Fleetwood highlight those artists in her exhibition and book, Marking Time. I feel like my role as an artist, with the skills and the tools that I have gained over the years that I continue to sharpen, continue to learn from and continue to add to, is that I want to find ways to soften those boundaries, make those boundaries porous, so that there’s something to be gained, that there’s something meaningful, that we can make together. It may not be this polished, highly finished work at the end. It might be the beautiful process that we just engaged in that we can’t even put into words. That is meaningful to me. That’s worth it when we can be in a room together, building something transcendent where people feel like they can be themselves

Christopher Coleman, one of the “Radioactive” ensemble members, said something so powerful in a podcast interview we conducted a couple of years ago. I think they had asked him a question about what his experience was like being part of the “Radioactive” project, and he said something along the lines of, “It was so transformative that even the shackles came off the hands of the guards.” I thought that was such a potent image. What it said to me was that not only is the carceral system oppressing those who are incarcerated, but it’s also oppressing the staff and all the other people who work within those systems.

This leads to other questions about how these systems become the primary economic driver of an entire community and how we rely on them. Why do we depend on them? To me, that was a compelling statement that went beyond ourselves.

Grace: I think a lot about the phrase carceral-impacted people or justice-impacted people. I understand why we use that phrasing, but it bothers me because we are all impacted. The threat is always there. I reread Are Prisons Obsolete? a couple of weeks ago, and there’s a point about how anyone unwell, anyone deemed unfit, anyone outside the norm gets put into prisons. By hiding people inside, we don’t have to confront any of these issues on a deeper level that could prevent them from happening in the first place. It creates this necessary remove to keep the system in place.

Maria: Yeah. I’ve been consumed by rage over what’s been happening in the last few months regarding the kidnapping of immigrants. We saw a version of this a few years ago with incarcerating entire families and children in immigrant detention centers. We’re seeing this in ways that maybe we hadn’t quite seen before. It’s absolutely brutal. The ways that people are being dehumanized and mistreated and abused, there’s a political rhetoric around normalizing this. We have to fight against it. 

While I am filled with rage, I am also hopeful. I think people are recognizing that this is a larger issue. We’re entering this fascist political moment, and we have to fight back. We have to defend each other and love each other and take care of each other, our neighbors, our community members, our students, and our loved ones.

I do feel like abolition has become more possible given how people have been embodying it in these different ways. It’s about this process. It’s about learning and relearning and holding each other accountable but also holding each other with some love and some hope. I hope that’s the direction we’re moving, but it’s going to take a lot of work. 

Grace: That’s one of the reasons I was so drawn to Disappearance Jail. One of the biggest questions about abolition is what will we have instead? Your project puts that question in the hands of the public in a way that allows everyone to reimagine what’s possible. I’m wondering how you set up that experience. How do you bring people into that conversation if they’re either skeptical about the idea of abolition, the way that art can be effective in these very real world problems, or maybe they feel they’re not creative enough to participate in something like this?

Maria: I think of it much like doing a public artwork. I’ve mentioned that I come from a mural background. That was my entry point into art making. What I recall from those experiences and working with local muralists in Chicago was that it was almost always a very inviting place. There was always an invitation to engage. Engaging meant cleaning the brushes, or engaging meant putting paint on the wall, or helping create the design, or helping take the scaffold down or up, but there was always this invitation to be a part of it. I feel fortunate to have had mentors who created those conditions where I felt like I could be part of something more. 

I do the same for Disappearance Jail. There are people who can get down with abolition, who understand it or are trying to understand it, who are interested. There might be others who are against it or don’t understand it, but are curious. There are all these different positionalities. The punch party is an invitation for you to come. I have not had anybody yet say they don’t want to punch anything out. Everybody has punched out an image so far. And we’ve punched out around 2,000 images, so at least that many people have punched out images of carceral facilities and have thought about what they want to see instead.

I guide folks through a set of five prompts, and we start with something like, Imagine freedom. What does it feel like? Taste like? Sound like? They need to take some time to think about what freedom means to them. Sometimes we do this in groups, or sometimes we do it individually. It depends on how people want to engage. Usually, it’s guided, so I’m giving people some context. I’m giving them information about the work. 

In some situations, we’ve had co-facilitators. I co-facilitated a one-punch party in California with Christopher Coleman, who I mentioned earlier, who was part of the “Radioactive” ensemble. I’ve also done it with other people who are local to that city, who may come from a community-based practice or local movement. We lead groups to think about these specific jails and prisons that they might recognize or maybe they have a connection to. I’ve had people share that their loved ones were incarcerated or that they have family members who work in those facilities. There are so many different connections, and sometimes people will share publicly, and sometimes they’ll just tell me.

I ask them to create a mark using the hole puncher and to imagine what, instead, they would like to see. Sometimes we’ll hold writing workshops, where participants can write a little bit about what that means to them to punch out. At other times, people will simply say it while they’re punching it out. They’ll say something like love or joy or community. It becomes this embodied experience of creating the perforation, creating the hole, and imagining a world without prisons.

I collect all the perforations that will be transformed, possibly composted one day. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it would mean to compost or transform those materials into something else, to let something grow. The Disappearance Jail images are printed onto rice paper. It has a kind of softness to it, but it’s also quite resilient as a material. Sometimes hole punchers get stuck, and a bit of tearing occurs. It feels a little like fabric. It’s interesting as a material to think about its relationship to fiber and fibrous things that grow from the ground. 

Grace: I love the compost idea. That’s beautiful.

Maria: I like the idea, too. I recently got into making paper. It’s such a beautiful process of making paper pulp and just working with scraps, you know? I think it’s such a beautiful transformation.

Grace: That was one of my favorite things to learn how to do as a kid. I wanted to do it all the time because it just feels so good. It’s soft, and touching the pulp is so satisfying. 

Maria: That is important to me, that touch feels good. That’s sometimes a strange thing to say when you’re looking at this image of a punitive system in your hands, right? And everything it represents. However, there’s something about the participant, being able to manipulate it, that’s really important: to cut away and be with the mark. 

I made some guidelines for the perforations because there was a point in one of the cities where people were starting to add words. They were quite beautiful–they’re lovely–but then I had to step back and really think about what that would mean to see a bunch of words. I decided to add a guideline that focuses on marks, rather than words. I’m inviting people to make a puncture without a word, so that the mark could be felt more by the viewer. 

Grace: How do you think about senses when you’re creating a community project? That feels so much a part of embodiment.

Maria: There was a point in my practice doing community work where I was dealing with a surface through images and language. I started to feel like it wasn’t enough to just deal with the surface. Then that work changed. We were looking at the jail, thinking about the wall and making that porous. I did it through screenshots of the jail using Google Earth. 

I wanted to take a different approach and to think of it like something that can be shaped and reshaped, abolished, or deconstructed. I was also beginning to do more performance work. I was really excited by the possibilities of movement and touch and creating these different kinds of compositions by way of the body or bodies together. We did some performance workshops for the “Radioactive” project, where we moved around in the room using  Augusto Boal-inspired performance exercises. Touching in jail is prohibited, so it was a particular kind of touch using just our fingertips.

There was something very sensorial, and there was a connection being made. For me, that was a moment where touch became really electric and in some ways radioactive, right? I thought that was a beautiful way of coming together, that we can be together through conversation and through drawing and through these collaborative exercises, but also through movement. 

I’m always trying to make things that feel embodied. I completed a project where I created a large textile curtain called “Haunting Raises Specters,” where it was essentially a visual representation of the jail wall, which can be arranged and rearranged in various configurations as an installation. I really wanted people to experience both sides of that textile, but you don’t quite know what is what side and also that the wall is movable. It could be gathered. It could be opened up. People can participate in it somehow. It’s essential to me that it feel embodied, and so I think that’s how I come to touch. 

Grace: I wanted to ask you a little bit about wellness. I think embodiment can sometimes be tied to influencer wellness culture and can mean a lot of different things to different people, particularly as we think about identity and positionality. Do you see there being a distinct connection between embodiment and collective or even individual well-being in your practice?

Maria: That’s a good question. Recently, I’ve been thinking more about healing. I mean, I think I’ve always been thinking about healing. Being together and being in community, it always has healing potential. We know that we’re not solitary beings.

It must be grounded in a consciousness of political struggle. I can’t think of wellness without some kind of political stake. Without it, it would feel really disconnected. It has to be grounded in understanding the different types of struggles that we have on an individual or community level, or neighborhood level or city level. There’s a political condition that needs to be recognized and identified, and considered when you’re thinking about what wellness means.

The Colossal-curated exhibition ‘No One Knows All It Takes’ is on view through December 20 in Milwaukee. Find more from Gaspar on her website and Instagram.