Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Chicago. She uses different mediums including installation, sculpture, sounds, visual arts, and performance in her practice of social justice art.
In 96 Acres Project, Gaspar’s project doesn’t just incorporate different disciplines, the project is also purposefully long term in time. By using various mediums and choices in individuals of varying ages, cultures, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds, Gaspar is a conductor over a symphony of voices and instruments. Her success lies not from manipulations over the musicians, but her ability to listen and encourage the formation of coalition once she's chosen her ensemble and the mediums used for exploration, ie, radio, workshops, internet, animation, zines, films, theater, and visual arts.
96 Acres is a project centered on the Cook County Jail and the impact of its presence in the neighborhood. The project has the following components, (1) a website that ties all the parts of the projects together; (2) community advisory committee; (3) workshops opened to the community; (4) interviews with inmates, their loved ones, and people who live in the community broadcast over Lumpen Radio (105.5 FM); and (5) site specific art events that incorporate visual art, sound art, and video art.
Gaspar recognized the impossibility of public art without the public. So instead of a large-scale sculpture or mural on the side of a building, she chose people, her audience to be an integral part of her public art. By engaging different segments of the local population, the teachers, the social workers, the artists, the adults, the teens, the children of the neighborhood and the nonprofit groups, Gaspar served as a conductor that harmonized the different citizens and factions of the neighborhood yet highlighted each to illustrate the complexity that is the Cook County Jail.
She could’ve concentrated just on the inmates and their lives. She could’ve simply honed in on the employees of the jail and the danger they face. She could’ve focused on the criminal justice system. She could’ve explored the history of criminology. But instead, by using the different segments of the local population and different mediums, she presents a multilayered narrative against the static backdrop of Cook County Jail. Further, by allowing public engagements containing the different mediums to occur along a long span of time, she’s using time as a parallel with time as a sentence to be served within the jail. So the project is never the same from one moment to the next. It moves with the community.
1. Website
The Website that devotes to 96 acres has its logo on the upper left-hand corner. To the right of the logo lists in columns, the facets of the project. Under the logo are photos shown as slides illustrating aspects of the facets, ie. workshops, personal stories, site specific art events, etc. Under the photos is a button to contribute. The opportunity to contribute tells the viewer that the project is ongoing and invites the viewer to be part of the project. Inviting the viewer to be part of the art. Under the “donate” button are the links to various social media sites.
When the viewer clicks on the list next to the 96 acres project logo starting with “96 Acres Project,” the viewer is introduced to a summary of what the project is about and its mission. Immediately the words such as “diverse,” “committee,” “community,” “stakeholders” are repeated throughout the description of the mission and the history of the project. The emphasis is on people populating the project. The key “ingredients” in the project consist of “An advisory group of community stakeholders, which includes educators, activists, artists, violence preventions workers, community leaders, the formerly incarcerated, youth, and parents was established to engage in a critical dialogue…” Credit is given to individuals responsible for the collaboration. Instead of concepts described, the people, their names, and their roles are listed for the viewer to understand what this project is about.
When the viewer clicks on “Cook County Jail,” a one paragraph description containing the physical location and the statistics of the jail is listed with a link for further information. This section is the shortest page on the project, highlighting the fact that the project about Cook County Jail is everything but the physicality of Cook County Jail. “Supporters” list the funders, stakeholders, and partners of the project. The list includes politicians, nonprofit organizations, art foundations, theater groups and social service programs, seemingly disparate in focus but singular in purpose in terms of their involvement with this project. Clicking on “News” serves as a listing of events. The events chronical art events that incorporate sound, ie, recorded stories of inmates and locals living in the area, projected animation, theater, community discussions.
Click on “Education” and the viewer can see workshops offered to the community engaging in dialog about the personal, for example, physical and emotional effects of incarceration and being around monuments of incarceration as well as the public, for example, how urban designs affects space. Click on “Listen to Stories” and the viewer is turned into a listener, a listen of stories by inmates, lawyers, people who live in the neighborhood. These stories are produced by people of all ages, reflecting validity of all views, regardless of color, age, creed, or economic status.
Under “Listen to Stories” is a link is “Submit Stories.” This link transforms the listener, the audience into a participate, a fellow artist, a fellow community member. This project that builds a community beyond the physical remains dynamic by building its own community within the project by invitations to donate, and to submit stories. The rest of the lists are extensions of opportunities to participate by finding future events on their “Events Calendar,” “Contact,” “Subscribe,” and “Support 96 Acres.”
2. Community Advisory Committee
The video at the bottom of the “96 Acre Project” link on top of the home webpage shows a meeting of the community steering committee. The members consist of residents in the neighborhood, “educators, activists, artists, violence preventions workers, community leaders, the formerly incarcerated, youth, and parents.” The first thing I noticed is that all voices are equal regardless of age or profession. Again, the importance of collaboration and respect between people being key ingredients in this project is highlighted. Every perspective is a valid perspective. When equality is established, the burden is lightened for the conductor to direct and control the impetus of progression. In Gaspar’s own words, “I’ve been involved for more than 15 years in public art projects and the most important aspect of the work is the process—test things out, evaluate, reflect, dialogue.”
3. Community Workshops
The workshops offered utilizes artistic expression through visualization, acting, playing, singing, devising, constructing in finding personal empowerment and alternatives to incarceration. The workshops are designed to give voice to those who feel voiceless in the community they live in. The workshops also serve to validate personal experiences and to find ways to change their circumstances. The focus of the workshops vary from the interior to the exterior. One of the workshops that focus on the interior is called, “Body Scanning: Mapping Spaces of Healing, Memory, and Collective Reflection/Freedom.” The workshop recognize that bodies are vessels that retain trauma and how from writing and art can the script of profiling be flipped and recognition that people of color deserve recognition of worth instead of false perspective of propensity for criminality. One of the workshops that focus on the exterior is “Infrastructures of Control: Space, Design, and Mechanisms of Power.” This workshop deals with prison designs and how the same type of designs permeates urban space. By recognizing the issues of lockdown mentality in design, solutions are explored in the workshop.
4. Stories broadcast on Lumpen Radio (105.5 FM)
This facet of the project is multi-purposed. The main purpose is to give voice to the community within and without the jail. But it also serves as a learning experience for the stories’ young producers. This part of the project “puts its money where its mouth is” because young people’s voices weren’t just heard in the advisory steering committee, but power and discretion were given to them by giving them the autonomy to produce stories for the project. The stories are told from the inmates, their loved ones, and the people who live in the neighborhood’s perspectives. When the listener listens to the interviews, each voice from within and without Cook County Jail sculpts the landscape of the community, giving solidity to the reality of the political and socio-economic situation of the jail and its surrounding neighborhood. Letting people tell their own stories instead of telling their stories for them adds authenticity and immediacy to the project.
5. Site Specific Art Events
Listed in the “News” section of the website are site specific art events. For example, one was called “Portraits of Resolution” where artists, William Estrada, Anthony Rea and Erica Brooks set up a mobile portrait site outside the Cook County Court house and asked people if they wanted to write how they felt about the justice system on the wall and pose next to it. People posted powerful messages and their faces showed their conviction that there must be something better than the justice system that currently exists. Just like every facet of this project, the individual is highlighted and valued.
Another event took place outside of Cook County Jail. It was a collaboration between Goodman Theater’s Department of Education and 96 Acres project. The Visible Voices Ensemble made up from previously incarcerated women did a body sculpture performance then invited children and adults to make kites with messages of support for the inmates. Then they flew the kites so the inmates could see them and know they’re supported and not forgotten. This project is multifaceted. The first purpose was to show support to the currently incarcerated. The second purpose is for the previously incarcerated women to be able to express themselves and empower them by having them help newly freed women. The third purpose is by encouraging children to write supportive messages and draw pictures on kites for the benefit of the incarcerated, they’re introduced to the idea that the incarcerated are people like them who need and deserve support just like anyone else, removing or mitigating the stigma surrounding incarceration.
Gaspar continues her collaborative art with the event “Radioactive: Stories from Behind the Wall.” She worked with a group of inmates to make digital animation and audio and project the image accompanied by sound on the walls of Cook County Jail. Gaspar duplicates her process with the inmates that she used with the steering community advisory committee. “My goal was to create a curious, trusting relationship, to provisionally disassemble any hierarchies between us.”
By forming a coalition for her public art project, Gaspar merged the distinction between artist and audience, subject and creator, participant and consumptor. The website serves as a map for the project as well as an entry as a participant through donations and opportunity to submit stories. The way Gaspar creates public art isn’t by large scale sculptures or installations, her ultimate medium is people. And by collaborations between individuals and organizations, her public art is continually in motion and changes with the development of the community through their citizens.
Bibliography
Gaspar, Maria, 96 Acres Project, Maria Gaspar, https://mariagaspar.com/96-acres-project, 12/20/2021
Gaspar, Maria, Body in Place, The Art Assignment, All Arts, https://allarts.org/programs/the-art-assignment/art-assignment-gaspar/12/20/2021
Gaspar, Maria, Visualizing Abolition, UC Santa Cruz Institute of Arts and Sciences, https://barringfreedom.org/artists/maria-gaspar, 12/20/2021.
Quiles, Daniel, Interviews, Art Forum, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/maria-gaspar-discusses-her-collaborative-work-with-incarcerated-communities-76597, 12/20/2021
Yeapanis,Stacia, OtherPeoplesPixels Interviews Maria Gaspar, OtherPeoplesPixels Blog, https://blog.otherpeoplespixels.com/otherpeoplespixels-interviews-maria-gaspar, 12/20/2021