arts & abolitionist futures - Open call for visual artists
About the project
arts & abolitionist futures is a community project engaging with principles from transformative justice to highlight the work of partners Abolitionist Futures – a grassroots collective engaged in political education to build capacity, working together to build a future without prisons, police and punishment. At present, the organisation is working on digitising the archive of The Abolitionist which was a 1980s journal by the ‘Radical Alternative to Prison group’.
Brief for artists
We have worked with organisers, students, members of communities affected by prisons and policing on bringing visual imagination to the movement.
We now invite visual artists to pitch your response to themes of abolitionist futures to generate a single visual outcome (in software design, lino print, painted, collage or other formats that can be scanned and reproduced). While word based art is welcomed, we are specifically interested in a strong visual dimension for these posters – radical, engaging perspectives that boost organising / imagining and producing less punishing societies.
Themes emerging from our community workshops:
mental health, community care, austerity
the racism of criminal punishment, harms of policing and custody
undoing carceral logics
intersectional struggles and the need for person centred care
collective solidarity
But we do encourage artists’ own responses to the abolitionist futures archives and resources.
From the initial call out, our panel of community members with lived experience of criminal punishment and some of the Abolitionist Futures collective will invite 5 artists to produce their work to completion for an honorarium of £250 each.
You may find additional inspiration in the archive of justseeds, a collective across the Americas that has a wealth of images, posters, resource packs and artist-led activist materials.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justseeds/?hl=en
Searchable archive of graphics: https://justseeds.org/graphics/?js-movement=beyond-prisons
Dates / timeframes
By Wed 8 May: 70 - 100 word response via email of what you want to produce as a visual outcome. (or asketch) [Via email with the subject line ‘arts & abolitionist futures art work’ ]
By Wed 15 May: 5 artists chosen by panel with lived experience of criminal punishment and Abolitionist Futures collective
By Fri 31 May: Final PDF print ready copies of visual materials for A2 or A1 printing sent to ally via wetransfer
Sat 15 June: final IRL event launch in Leeds [details TBC]
Contact person: ally walsh a.m.walsh1@leeds.ac.uk
Open invitation: Any artists not in the 5 commissioned are very welcome to contribute their work to the collective gallery of community artworks responding to the themes, issues and causes of futures without prisons, police and punishment. Sending in your posters, designs, images to ally.
Terms and conditions
Payment: will be done via the University of Leeds so once artists are invited to proceed, we will need to set up aninvoice and get registered as providers swiftly so that the fee can be processed timeously. We will investigate a voucher system if folks would lose benefits with a straight fee.
Sharing and copyright: The works will be reproduced and available with full attribution on the website, and can be used by Abolitionist Futures for engaging movements, building capacity and inspiring change. The creator retains authorship of the original work, but it is shared under Creative commons licence: CC BY-NC-ND. This license enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for non-commercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator.
Contact person: ally walsh a.m.walsh1@leeds.ac.uk
A Sapling project funded by the University of Leeds Cultural Institute and the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute.