Abolition Then & Now with historian and cultural theorist Robin D. G. Kelley and artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, co-presented with McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, is the next event in Visualizing Abolition.

Abolition Then & Now features Robin Kelley and Isaac Julien in conversation about the anti-slavery movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and current abolitionist uprisings against racist police brutality and the prison industrial complex. This event coincides with the presentation of Julien’s Lessons of the Hour, 2019, a ten-screen film installation that explores the legacy of Frederick Douglass and his vision for abolition in relationship to contemporaneity, at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco. A composite version of that moving and monumental artwork will be screened for 24-hours online prior to the event.

This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s yearlong series on Memory.

For the 2020/21 academic year, UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Gina Dent, feminist studies, has organized a year-long series of online events featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition.

The events of Visualizing Abolition accompany Barring Freedom, a bi-coastal exhibition of art featuring Sonya Clark, American Artist, Dread Scott, Deana Lawson, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, Sharon Daniel, Sanford Biggers, and other artists whose practices creatively confront the failure of many to see the racist biases within the criminal justice system or to comprehend the economic and social problems that the system serves to obscure. Barring Freedom will be on view at San José Museum of Art late October 2020-March 21, 2021.

Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.

Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.