Arresting Patterns: Race and the Criminal Justice System

This exhibition brings together a group of artists who seek to uncover the often-overlooked patterns of racial disparity in the United States Criminal Justice system.  The urgent need to explore indicators of intentional and unintentional discrimination arises in the aftermath of the Ferguson verdict, the Baltimore riots, the killing of Eric Garner, and the killing of William K. Scott.  These events have produced collective frustration around the question of whether every citizen is protected equally under the law, and have lead to a call for a more transparent dialogue between citizens, law enforcement, and policy makers.

The selected artworks use serial repetition as a strategy for showcasing how one action, repeated over time, may accumulate, spread, or evolve into another version of its original self.  The show situates repetition as an aesthetic arena within which artists can show difference within a shared experience, or pursue its opposite, replicating an image in perpetuity until it is emptied of meaning.  Read through this critical lens, the works produce a variety of affects– pacifying, enraging, seducing, neutralizing, and leaving the viewer on inconclusive ground. The show focuses on repetition and replication, and to recognize how a system might evolve into a new version of itself over time.

Artspace is working with New Haven-based painter Titus Kaphar to develop the historical, curatorial, and educational portions of this exhibition.  Visitors will encounter a timeline of the history of racial violence in America that begins in the 1700s and focuses on events that took place in New Haven.  Kaphar’s series of chalk on blackboard drawings from The Jerome Project sparked the idea for the numbers-driven framework of the show.  This project started when a search for his father in the U.S. prison system turned up 99 incarcerated African American men with the same first and last name.  Those Federal Registry images put in stark relief the racial bias in our judicial system, giving visual form to the notion that the sentencing policies over the past 40 years have transformed the nation’s prison system into a modern equivalent of Jim Crow. In an attempt to make sense of these images, he painted each of the mug shots in the Byzantine icon style of Saint Jerome. The works in Arresting Patterns similarly demonstrate how artworks might act as surrogates for standard data visualization charts and graphs.

A companion exhibition displays the work of 18 high school students from the New Haven Public School district who collaborated with Kaphar and theater artists Aaron Jafferis and Dexter Singleton to create new work inspired by The Jerome Project. The exhibition also features a reading room, where viewers may read texts, essays, and archival clippings on the impact of the criminal stereotype on prisoners, their families, and entire communities.  The exhibition will close with a free two-day conference organized by attorney Leland Moore and the Artspace staff at the Yale University Art Gallery on Saturday, September 12 to Sunday, September 13, 2015.  The conference is open to the public.

Learn more about the Arresting Patterns Conference, including program details and speaker bios in this program book.

Arresting Patterns moves to the African American Museum in Philadelphia, April 21 to September 11, 2016. Learn More.

Press Coverage:

Art Matter, 7/13/15 Arresting Patterns: Race and the Criminal Justice System

New Haven Register, 7/17/15 Amarante, Joe ‘Arresting Patterns’ reception Friday at Artspace New Haven

Contemporary And, 7/23/15 Arresting Patterns

New Haven Independent, 7/27/15 Gellman, Lucy  The “New Jim Crow” Through New Haven Eyes

Yale News, 8/3/15 Morand, Michael Alumnus artist Titus Kaphar creates, connects, and builds community in New Haven

artcritical, 8/24/15  Machado, Danilo Aesthetics and Social Justice: “Arresting Patterns” at Artspace

Yale Daily News, 9/11/15, Seymour, Sara Arresting Patterns: Illustrating Injustice

The New Yorker, 12/9/15 Sargent, Antwaun Confronting America’s Shameful Mass Incarceration with Art

CRG@CGP, 4/28/2016  “The Modern Equivalent of Jim Crow”: Arresting Patterns and the Fight to End Police Brutality

Philadelphia Inquirer, 5/27/16 Salisbury, Stephan African American Museum exhibition explores ‘crisis’ of incarceration