About This Case Study

A defining feature of the carceral system is that it removes people from view. Prisons are built at a distance from the communities most affected by them; the people inside become numbers in a count, their faces and lives largely invisible to the public in whose name they are confined. Against that machinery of disappearance, a body of public art has grown up that does the opposite work — making the system, and the personhood of the people caught in it, visible again. This case study assembles a small gallery from two such bodies of work: Mural Arts Philadelphia's Restorative Justice program, which for over two decades has produced murals and public art with incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and justice-involved people in the most-incarcerated major city in the United States; and UC Santa Cruz's Visualizing Abolition initiative, a public-scholarship project that gathers artists, scholars, and currently and formerly incarcerated collaborators around the question of what a world without prisons might look like.

A mural or an exhibition can look like decoration, or like advocacy, but this case study asks you to read it as an argument and as a form of counter-surveillance. The frame comes from Simone Browne, who calls the monitoring, sorting, and tracking of racialized people racializing surveillance — a technology of racial boundary-making that runs from the slave ship's ledger and the runaway notice to the prison count and the biometric scan. Browne also names its underside: dark sousveillance, or "watching back" — the tactics by which surveilled people observe, document, evade, and critique the systems watching them, reversing the direction of the gaze. The analytical move here is to ask whether abolitionist public art functions as watching back: whether, by making the carceral system visible and insisting on the humanity it erases, these works turn the surveillant gaze around. You will build a gallery of four works, read each closely, and then test that frame against what you find.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• Mural Arts Philadelphia, Restorative Justice program — the program page, which links to specific projects and artworks (among them Portraits of Justice and the End the Exception campaign on prison labor).
• UC Santa Cruz, Visualizing Abolition — and in particular its Exhibitions section, which holds artworks and artist interviews from the Barring Freedom exhibition.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on access and currency: public art moves, exhibitions close, and websites are reorganized. Some works will be viewable only as online documentation rather than in person, and individual project links may shift; if a specific page has moved, navigate from the two program sites above. The exercise works from whatever each site currently presents.

Before you begin selecting, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• When you picture a prison or a person who is incarcerated, where does the image come from — news, film, television, a mugshot? Who made that image, and what does it ask you to feel?
• What would it mean for a work of art to "watch back" at a system designed to watch and sort people? How would you recognize it if you saw it?

The Exercise

Phase 1: Building the Gallery (8–10 minutes)

Browse the two sites and select four works to form your gallery. Aim for range: draw from both Mural Arts and Visualizing Abolition, and choose works that differ from one another — a portrait and an installation, a mural and a video interview, a piece made inside a prison and one made outside it.

If you would like a reliable starting set, the following anchor the exercise well, and all are reachable through the two sites above:

• Portraits of Justice (Mural Arts, Russell Craig and Jesse Krimes). Larger-than-life portraits of seventeen young people from the Restorative Justice Guild program, set against a brick background that stands for the systems creating barriers to reentry — painted by Guild graduates who were themselves system-involved.
• End the Exception (Mural Arts). A project joining a national campaign in which a network of incarcerated artists addresses prison labor and the Thirteenth Amendment's clause permitting involuntary servitude "as a punishment for crime."
• A work from Barring Freedom (Visualizing Abolition). The exhibition gathers artists — among them Sonya Clark, Dread Scott, Deana Lawson, and Sanford Biggers — whose works confront mass incarceration and policing; the Exhibitions section pairs many works with the artist's own interview.
• Solitary Garden (jackie sumell, on view at UC Santa Cruz). A garden bed the dimensions of a solitary-confinement cell, planted in collaboration with a person held in solitary, that makes the architecture of isolation visible at human scale.

Have your four works open or printed so you can move between them.

For groups: decide in advance whether all members will engage the same four works (better for discussion) or distribute them across the group (better for breadth). Either works.

Phase 2: At Each Station (25–30 minutes)

Take each work in turn. Spend roughly six or seven minutes per piece. For each, work through these five prompts in your notes:

1. Description. What does the work show or contain? What is its medium, scale, and setting? Describe it plainly before interpreting — what a viewer who knew nothing about it would actually see.
2. What is made visible. The carceral system works in part by keeping things out of sight. What does this work bring into view that is usually hidden — a person, a space, a number, a condition, a history? Whose presence does it insist on?
3. The gaze and its direction. Who is looking at whom? Surveillance points a gaze at racialized people and sorts them. Does this work reverse that — does it look back at the system, at the viewer, at the public? Or does it position the viewer as another kind of observer?
4. Authorship and standpoint. Who made the work, and from what position — a currently or formerly incarcerated artist, a collaborator outside, an institution? How does the maker's standpoint shape what the work can claim to know?
5. Mode and register. What is the work doing — documenting, mourning, accusing, portraying, imagining a future? Not every abolitionist work watches back; some witness, some envision. Name the register as precisely as you can.

Do not try to interpret before describing. Stay with the work. The interpretive synthesis happens in Phase 3.

For groups: each member produces their own notes in this phase. Do not share yet.

Phase 3: Reading Across the Gallery (12–15 minutes)

Now examine your notes across the four works. The question is no longer what each piece does individually but what the gallery asserts collectively. Look for:

• Recurrences. What strategies, images, or moves appear across more than one work — the human face, the dimensions of a cell, the use of an incarcerated person's own words, the naming of a specific law or statistic?
• Divergences. Where does one work depart sharply from the others — in medium, in tone, in whether it documents the present or imagines an alternative? What does the departure reveal?
• The shared argument. If you treat the four works as a single body rather than four separate pieces, what is its central claim about the carceral system and the people inside it? What does it want the viewer to see that statute and statistics do not?

For groups: members present their station notes in turn (two minutes each). The group then names one or two recurrences everyone noticed and one divergence that surprised someone.

Phase 4: Watching Back (10–12 minutes)

Return to Browne. Her argument, compressed: surveillance has long been a way of producing and policing racial boundaries — of watching racialized people and sorting them into categories that carry consequences. The prison is one endpoint of that history; the count, the record, and the cell are its instruments. Dark sousveillance names the counter-tradition — the practices by which the watched watch back, document the apparatus, and refuse the terms of their own sorting.

Bring this frame to your gallery and ask:

• Where, in these works, do you see watching back — a reversal of the surveillant gaze, an insistence on visibility and personhood against a system that reduces people to numbers and keeps them out of sight?
• Where, instead, do you see something the frame does not quite name — mourning, testimony, the imagining of an abolitionist future? These are not "watching back" in Browne's sense; they operate in another register. Naming the difference precisely is part of the work.
• Where does the frame strain? Consider that some works are made by artists outside the prison rather than by the surveilled themselves; that public art can be absorbed into institutions and made safe; and that visibility is double-edged — to make someone visible can also expose them. Does watching back illuminate these works, and where does it reach its limit?

For groups: move quickly through the first two questions and spend the most time on where the frame strains.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

Across the four works, the carceral system is rendered visible as __________. Reading these works as "watching back" in Browne's sense shows __________. The hardest thing to hold steady, after this exercise, is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly what the works make visible and exactly where the frame reaches its limit.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work through the four phases in order. The station notes from Phase 2 and the cross-gallery reading from Phase 3 are the central artifacts; keep them for use with the unit's questions on Browne and racializing surveillance.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 is collective (selecting works together) or distributed (each member taking a different work); Phase 2 is individual; Phase 3 begins with brief presentations and moves to collective synthesis; Phase 4 works as full-group discussion. If group time is short, the closing reflection can be assigned as individual writing after the session.

After the Case Study

• The Visualizing Abolition site collects artist interviews and study materials that pair each work with the artist's own account of it, for those who want to work from the makers' words rather than from the image alone.
• Mural Arts documents many Restorative Justice projects beyond the four above, including murals made inside SCI Phoenix; reading the program's own framing of its work raises the question, useful to hold alongside the art, of what art produced through a justice institution can and cannot do.
• For the abolitionist arguments these works draw on, see Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories, 2003) and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag (University of California Press, 2007), both in the unit's Further Readings; reading the art alongside the argument lets you ask what a mural can say that a monograph cannot, and the reverse.