CONVERSATION - Curating from the Inside: Women Exposing Prison through Art and Poetry

MoAD, Empowerment Avenue and Flyaway Productions present

A Conversation | Curating from the Inside: Women Exposing Prison through Art and Poetry

This conversation celebrates the launch of the digital exhibition The Only Door I Can Open: Women Exposing Prison through Art and Poetry on MoAD's website. It explores the challenges faced by women at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla where both the co-curators and all of the artists for this exhibition reside, while uplifting the empowerment that telling their own stories can bring. Ultimately, the partnership between MoAD, Empowerment Avenue and Flyaway Productions seeks to bring light to the conditions of incarcerated women, to humanize and connect them with those on the outside, and to insist on radical prison systems change that especially impact BIPOC women.

Joining in conversation are Robin Levi, co-editor of Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives From Women's Prisons; Rahsaan Thomas, formerly incarcerated at San Quentin, the founder and executive director of Empowerment Avenue and a producer on the award-winning podcast EarHustle; Asia Johnson, a Los Angeles based writer, storyteller, and filmmaker who has worked with several organizations in the criminal justice reform space; Rachel Nelson, director and chief curator of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at University of California, Santa Cruz and co-director of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based public scholarship initiative on prisons, art, and the movement for abolition; and Anna Ruiz, a contributing artist to The Only Door I Can Open: Women Exposing Prison through Art and Poetry.

The conversation will be presented in person at MoAD and will be live-streamed on our YouTube channel.

This program is presented on conjunction with the performances of If I Give You My Sorrows, an apparatus-based dance with an accompanying exhibition of visual art at Space 124 inside Project Artaud from October 6 - 15. Learn more and get tickets here.

Robin S. Levi is a women's human rights consultant who writes and speaks on women's human rights in the United States. In addition, Robin is currently an independent college counselor. From 2012-19, she was College Outreach Manager at Students Rising Above, which supports low-income, first generation students in applying to and then successfully graduating from college. Until April 2012, Robin was the founding Human Rights Director at Justice Now, which partners with people inside women's prisons to build a safe, compassionate world without prisons. Robin is also the co-editor of Inside this Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women's Prisons. A 1993 graduate of Stanford Law School, Robin has written and spoken extensively on women's human rights here and abroad including the Women's Institute for Leadership for Human Rights, the Drug Policy Alliance and the Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.

Rahsaan Thomas is a writer, director, podcaster, producer, consultant, social justice advocate and the Executive Director of Empowerment Avenue, a program he created while incarcerated to meet the pre-entry needs of incarcerated writers and artist, helping them to get their voices in mainstream spaces for prevailing wages. As a freelance writer, he has bylines in Business Insider, The Appeal, Boston Globe and The Marshall Project. He is most known for co-hosting and co-producing the podcast, Ear Hustle, as well as appearances in United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell, and the documentary What These Walls Won't Hold. Initiate Justice credits Rahsaan with sparking the campaign that led to the successful restoration of voting rights for people on parole in California. Friendly Signs, a short documentary he directed and produced while in prison premiered at the San Francisco DocFest.

Anna Ruiz was born in Los Angeles and raised in Watts, California. As an artist she tries to create images that resonate with the human experience. Her influences are culturally based, as a first generation born Mexican-American woman. Living in an unrepresented underprivileged sector of Los Angeles has allowed her to see the commonalities shared within impoverished homes. She participated in her first art show in 2019, curated at the Central California Women's Facility at Chowchilla.

Asia Johnson is a Los Angeles based writer, storyteller, and filmmaker who has worked with several organizations in the criminal justice reform space, including The Bail Project, cut50, Shakespeare in Prison, Prison Creative Arts Program, Hamtramck Free School, and the Michigan Prison Doula Initiative. Asia is a 2019 Right of Return Fellow, 2021 Brennan Center for Justice Fellow, and an Art for Justice grantee. Her Chapbook, An Exorcism, was released in 2018 and her film, Out of Place was screened at universities across the country. Asia studied at University of Michigan-Dearborn and is the Manager of Storytelling and Local Organizing at Zealous. When Asia isn't helping to uplift the stories of those impacted by the criminal legal system and making her dream of a world without cages come true, she is writing poetry.

Dr. Rachel Nelson is director and chief curator of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at University of California, Santa Cruz and co-director of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based public scholarship initiative on prisons, art, and the movement for abolition. She has curated and organized exhibitions with artists including Carlos Motta; Forensic Architecture, Sadie Barnette, Jackie Sumell, Maria Gaspar, Carolina Caycedo and David de Roza, among others. Nelson also writes and publishes extensively on contemporary art and geopolitics, including exhibition catalogue essays, journal articles, and reviews in Journal of Curatorial Studies, Public History Weekly, Brooklyn Rail, NKA, Third Text, Savvy, and African Arts. She teaches in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at UC Santa Cruz.