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Sunday 05/04/14 3PM
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Exhibition-Related

“Hear, Here” Gallery Sessions: Jean Casella and Five Mualimm-ak: “Voices from Solitary”

Cover Image:

Background of Cover Image: Jeanine Oleson, Untitled, 2014. Intaglio print, 12 × 7 ¼ in (30.5 × 18.5 cm). Printed by Marina Ancona, 10 Grand Press. Courtesy the artist

Presented in conjunction with “Hear, Here” and the spring R&D Season: VOICE.

“Hear, Here” Gallery Sessions is a series of public events that take place within the exhibition “Hear, Here” by Jeanine Oleson, presented in the Fifth Floor Gallery. The set and objects for an opera created by Oleson (to premiere in the New Museum Theater June 13–14) will be present during the run of the exhibition, forming an impromptu stage set and catalyst for this series. Each session is led by an invited guest or guests who react to the concepts and objects presented in the exhibition.

Sunday May 4 at 3 PM
Jean Casella and Five Mualimm-ak: “Voices from Solitary”

Tens of thousands of men, women, and children live in solitary confinement in US prisons, spending twenty-three to twenty-four hours a day alone in small, bare cells. Jean Casella and Five Mualimm-ak will present a series of letters and drawings reflecting lives lived in complete isolation, and the hosts and audience will collectively read these letters.

Jean Casella is Codirector and Editor-in-Chief of Solitary Watch, a watchdog website founded to help bring the hidden human rights issue of solitary confinement in US prisons out of the shadows and into the light of the public square. Casella’s writing has also appeared in the Nation, Mother Jones, the Guardian, Al Jazeera, and other publications. In 2012, she received a Soros Justice Media Fellowship from the Open Society Foundations for her work on solitary confinement.

Five Mualimm-ak was released in 2012 from New York State prison, where he spent five years in solitary confinement. He is Founder and Director of the Incarcerated Nation Campaign and a core member of the New York Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement, the New York City Jails Action Coalition, and the Campaign to End the New Jim Crow. Mualimm-ak often travels to community centers, colleges, universities, and houses of worship to speak about the issues of solitary confinement and mass incarceration.

A complete list of “Hear, Here” Gallery Sessions and participants includes:

May 1 – Angel Nevarez/Valerie Tevere
May 4 – Jean Casella and Five Mualimm-ak
May 9 – Joy Askew
May 10 – Rainy Orteca
May 18 – Courtesy the Artists
May 24 – Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
May 31 – Cara Baldwin
June 1 – Jaleh Mansoor
June 5 – Kelly Pratt

Sponsors

“Jeanine Oleson: Hear, Here” is made possible, in part, through the support of the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Additional support for artist residencies is made possible by Laurie Wolfert.
Generous endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund, and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.
Education and public programs are made possible by a generous grant from Goldman Sachs Gives at the recommendation of David B. Heller & Hermine Riegerl Heller.
The curator would like to extend a special thanks to the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Parsons The New School for Design, and Dazian Creative Fabric Environments.

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