Daniel R. Duron is an Organizational Studies major in Pitzer’s Inside/Out BA program at the California Rehabilitation Center. The younger of his mother’s two children, Daniel is deeply fond of his family, and loves both his mother and sister dearly. He is grateful for this opportunity to express himself productively, saying, “I have always felt excluded and discriminated against because of my heritage, and I know whole lot of other people feel the same. I hope this manifesto inspires inclusivity. Thank you.”
Chaos rained, the day you came A hundred different lives you laid claim And now I go home, to an empty space A hundred different losses I have to face
So three set out to find you Guided by a full moon They found you there in the sky A grizzly bear with piercing eyes
Ursa Major, great bear of no fear Your blood paints our trees About once every year No matter how far I go I know you’ll always appear Oh, I love you so Oh, I hate to go
They go far, to track you down Paw prints emerge from the ground To the highest peak, they climb it all And straight into the sky they all fall
So we set out to find them We came back empty handed Three more losses we mourned As three new stars had been born
Ursa Major, you’re all that I see No other constellation means as much to me No matter how far I go I’ll always know your worth I’ll find you again real soon Where the lights touch the earth
Ursa Major, great bear of no fear Your blood paints our trees About once every year No matter how far I go I know you’ll always appear Oh, I love you so Oh, I hate to go
About the artist: GiGi is a 20-year old, American Indian artist and actress, born and raised just outside of San Francisco. GiGi’s American Indian heritage has always been a large part of who she is, and now she is sharing and honoring her culture through song. What started as drawings of constellations and a few chord progressions has taken off. GiGi’s music enthusiastically re-tells the stories that she loved as a kid and gives voice to new stories that deserve to be heard. As a solo artist, she writes and produces all her own music, and is now debuting her first single, Ursa Major. “Honor the land you are on, and share our stories, so that they will not be forgotten.”
“I hope that this song brings you comfort and light in a time of revolution. Ursa Major is based on the story of The Celestial Bear from the Iroquois tribe. Let it be a reminder that we are still here. Aheeiyeh, my friends.” – GiGi Buddie, PO ’22
The Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Plan, authored more than 50 years ago, continues to resonate today. For a historical perspective on the goals outlined in The Ten Point Plan, in 1966, and recent data on racial equity, we recommend this story at Oakland North.
DISP[LA]CED MAGAZINE SEEKS TO EMBODY AN EVOLVING DIGITAL RESOURCE AND EMOTIONAL ARCHIVE WHERE ALLIES CAN ACCESS INFORMATION ON HOW TO TACKLE GENTRIFICATION AND DISPLACEMENT IN THEIR OWN NEIGHBORHOODS.
Nicholas Endicott, Cassie (Yizhen) Li, Izzy Manson, Grace Russell, Eliza Schmidt, Sophia Silane, Kieran Silva, Eve Sperling, Ingrid Topp-Johnson, and Nancy Xing, and Solánas Yaya
Nick Endicott
Nick Endicott is an artist by nature. His work is always changing. In the past four years, it has included animation, fashion, digital collage, video, drag, content creation for social media, oil painting, vocal performance, photography, scenic design, sculpture, event planning, and long-form comedy improvisation. In his senior thesis project, he is at last breaking into the world of e-commerce.
Nick Endicott, Coat (in progress), 2020, coat and hanger, dimensions variable
Cassie (Yizhen) Li
In her thesis project, Cassie (Yizhen) Li explores various emotions in this chaotic time through a series of non-narrative animated videos in relation to reality and augmented reality. In a reflection of the impact of technology on our daily lives and the conception of “home”, she focuses on the dramatic perspectives that address the different states of mind in relation to nature, the universe, and the internet.
Cassie (Yizhen) Li, To the X we will never get, 2020, digital video
Izzy Manson
Izzy Manson’s Senior Thesis project grew out of the artist’s personal experience of riding horses, which she did daily for all of her childhood and young adulthood. horses cannot see red explores themes of care, fear, freedom and control all of which are inherent aspects of equestrianism.
Izzy Manson, Two girls watching the filly be born, 2020, archival pigment print, 16 x 20 inches
Grace Russell
Drawing inspiration from artists such as Salvador Dali and Robert Yarber, Grace Russell’s work engages in a play between the real and the imagined. Informed by Surrealism, as well as strains of contemporary painting that employ unnatural color schemes, disorienting subject matter, and cartoonish elements, her two dimensional works present critiques of society, politics, and philosophy.
Grace Russell, Looking Forward, 2020, acrylic on four plywood panels, 48 x 60 inches
Eliza Schmidt
Eliza Schmidt is a Brooklyn born, LA-based artist interested in the confluence of art, craft, life, and sustainable design. Focusing on materiality, domestic histories, and archival practices, her work addresses global themes of climate change, utopia, belonging, and gender. Schmidt has an innate desire to listen and to tell stories, experimenting with a myriad of mediums to support the message.
Eliza Schmidt with Barbara Drake, I see the women so very very strong, 2020, digital book (detail, selected pages). Design and panoramic photographs by Eliza Schmidt
Sophia Silane
Sophia Silane’s Senior Thesis project addresses themes of permanence, control, and lack thereof in one’s home through disorienting ink drawings comprising a stop motion video. In an attempt to preserve memories, these drawings depict suburban plants and architecture, familiar and fragile visions that remain in a constant state of demolition and transformation.
Sophia Silane, Lakefront, 2020, series of 81 images (detail), ink on newsprint, stop motion
Kieran Silva
Kieran Silva’s thesis project comprises a video documenting the artist’s performance, completed in the spring of 2020 amid the COVID-19 quarantine. In the video, Kieran is seen grazing on an expanse of grass, imitating the action of mowing. Behind the artist, a slideshow displays domestic landscapes found in his family photo album, and photographs of warehouses in the eastern, industrial section of Riverside, California.
Pulling from a vocabulary of historical attire and interior design, Eve Sperling’s work explores the ways in which history and luxury have been displayed in the home space, and the boundaries between the living and inanimate beings that now occupy her sight in quarantine. Heavily influenced by theories of the uncanny, she casts her living spaces as disturbingly familiar sights.
Eve Sperling, Untitled (Portrait Sitting), 2020, early 19th century French Empire Bergère, white leather gloves, goose down filling, dimensions variable
Ingrid Topp-Johnson
Ingrid Topp-Johnson’s senior thesis project, As It Stands Now, diarizes and stylizes the artist’s adaptation as she returned to her childhood home in Minnesota, from her life as a student in Southern California, on the eve of her graduation. As It Stands Now, which takes the form of a downloadable PDF, is a meditation on uncertainty, messianic hope, and the role of intention in creating the self.
Ingrid Topp-Johnson, As Things Stand (for Ingrid ToppJohnson at least), 2020, digital work
Nancy Xing
Envisioned as a Digital App concept, Nancy Xing’s senior thesis project is designed to help people maintain a healthy lifestyle as they adjust to the public health requirements of social distancing due to the global Coronavirus pandemic.
Nancy Xing, User Research, 2020
Solánas Yaya
Solánas Yaya is a manifestor, a Trans-Atlantic Afro-Indigenous artist, botanist, poet, shapeshifter, and universe traveler. Solánas’ work focuses on bringing spirituality, healing, and a Black Indigenous Queer Femme-centric lens to the forefront of art. They work through Earth vibrational-based energies and hope to take you on a journey to their imagined commune.
Solánas Yaya, Trip to the Commune / Psilocybin, 2020, Digital Photograph
Ashley Hunt’s current project, Degrees of Visibility, is a large body of landscape photographs made in locations throughout the fifty U.S. states and territories, which documents the spaces in which prisons are embedded. Observed from publicly accessible points of view, Hunt’s photographs look at how prisons are presented and camouflaged within our everyday perception and how they contribute to an aesthetics of mass incarceration.
This body of work is part of Hunt’s ongoing examination of how images, objects, maps, writing and performance can engage social ideas and actions, including those of social movements, daily life, the exercise of political power, and the disciplinary boundaries that separate our art worlds from the larger worlds in which they sit. His work looks to structures that allow people to accumulate power, and those which keep others from getting it, while learning from the ways people come to know, contribute to or resist these structures. Rather than seeing art and activism as two exclusive spheres of practice, he approaches them as mutual and complementary—drawing upon the ideas and aesthetics of social movements, cultural theory and art alike, the theorizing and practices of each informing the other.
Recent exhibitions and performances include the performance and book, Notes on the Emptying of a City, a dismantled film that recounts his time in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; Communograph, a multi-platform project with Project Row Houses in Houston; the ongoing collaboration with taisha paggett, On Movement, Thought and Politics; the collaborative 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, produced for documenta 12 with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Katya Sander and David Thorne; and the Corrections Documentary Project, the ongoing body of work addressing the aesthetics and politics of prison expansion and mass incarceration in the U.S., including ten video works, photographic works and mappings that span sixteen years of research, production and organizing.
Additionally, Hunt has exhibited at the Cue Art Foundation, Threewalls Gallery in Chicago, The Kitchen in New York, the 2012 Made in L.A. Biennial of the Hammer Museum, Sinopale 4 biennale in Sinop, Turkey, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, Woodbourne State Correctional Institute in upstate New York, Putnamville Correctional Institution in Indiana, and numerous grassroots and community venues throughout the U.S. Recent writing has appeared in X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly (2014), Native Strategies issue 4 (2014), Shifter Magazine #20 (2013).
Hunt is on the faculty of California Institute of the Arts and was on the faculty of the Visual Arts MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts 2008–2016.
Conversation Series and Related Events
Critical Resistance presents Los Angeles for Abolition: Dismantling Jails and Building Liberation with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, with Robin D.G. Kelley, Sarah Haley, Michael Saavedra, Azadeh Zohrabi
Saturday, September 14 at 7:00 p.m., Watts Labor Community Action Center, 10950 S Central Ave, Los Angeles, www.criticalresistance.org/sept14
On Art and Organizing, a conversation with Ashley Hunt and Jess Heaney of Critical Resistance
Thursday, September 19 at 8:00 p.m., Lenzner Family Art Gallery, Pitzer College, 1050 N Mills Avenue, Claremont.
Jess Heaney (Scripps College ’08 and 2018 Scripps College Outstanding Recent Alumna) and Ashley Hunt will discuss Degrees of Visibility and Hunt’s work with Critical Resistance against the current landscape of abolition in Southern California.
Critical Resistance and The Claremont Colleges Prison Abolition Club present a two part symposium: Intro to Prison-Industrial Complex Abolition
Friday, September 20, 3:00-6:00 p.m., and Abolition of Policing, Saturday, September 21, 1:00-4:00 p.m., The Hive, Studio 2, 130 E 7th Street, Claremont. RSVP: [email protected]
California Coalition of Women Prisoners presents Gender Violence Behind Bars: Tactics of Resistance
Taylor Lytle, Michaé Pulido, Fatima Malika Shabazz and Rojas, moderated by Alisa Bierria, will speak about their experiences of gendered violence while incarcerated, followed by a discussion with organizers from CCWP and audience members on how to fight for women and gender-non-conforming individuals behind bars.
Taylor Lytle is an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) and a national Peer 2 Peer Fellow. Taylor is a former foster care youth and formerly incarcerated, having been caged as a youth and later at the California Institution for Women (CIW), one of California’s state prisons. Upon her release from prison, Taylor has dedicated herself to ending the prison industrial complex. She’s a talented poet and uses her craft to advocate for women still behind bars.
Stacy Rojas is an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and the Young Women’s Freedom Center. Rojas was incarcerated for 15 years at the Central California Women’s Facility.
Michaé is a queer, trans, Latinx community connector, artist, and skill sharer born and raised in Los Angeles. She currently works as the policy coordinator at the [email protected] Coalition, where she is working to change the landscape for trans-inclusive legislation statewide and nationally. Navigating this world post-gender, Michaé sees the direct impact of a corrupt social, economic, and political system that hurts those that choose to not live abiding by the norm. They believe it is their responsibility to uplift the real experiences of the trans community, not just what is glamorized. In becoming more fluent in the policy process, she brings information about the system back to her community and works to improve conditions for future generations of Black, Brown, indigenous, queer, and trans people.
Fatima Malika Shabazz is a 55 year-old formerly incarcerated Transwoman, LGBTQ Social Activist and criminal justice reform and restorative justice advocate belonging to several different organizations: All of us or none; Time done; Advisory Board member for Prison health news; Black and pink LA; Ceo/President of Fatima Speaks LLC. She seeks to create safer and more inclusive spaces for LGBTQ+ men and woman, as well as to create policies that ensure the enforcement of laws that should protect the trans population.
Alisa Bierria is a co-founder of Survived and Punished, a member of INCITE!, and an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside.
Sunday, October 13, 2:00-4:00 p.m., NAVEL, 1611 S Hope Street, Los Angeles.
Practicing Abolition will explore how research, education, conversations, organizing, collaboration, ethics and boundaries can contribute to a complementary practices of abolition and creativity.
Panel and discussion organized by gloria galvez, with Micah Bournes, Jasmine Nyende, Shabina Toorawa, Ellie Virrueta, and performances by Ra Avis and Cole M James.
Critical Resistance LA presents Abolition is Ongoing: Reportback from the campaign to stop Los Angeles jail construction
CRLA and partners defeated two huge plans for a $3 billion in jail construction this year! How to ensure that LA County follows through. Learn about what is next and how to get involved.
Friday, November 8, 8:00-9:30 p.m., Garrison Theater at Scripps College, 231 E 10th Street, Claremont.
Scripps College Department of Dance Faculty Suchi Branfman explores the prison industrial complex through several pieces inspired by her five-year choreographic residency at California Rehabilitation Center, a medium-security men’s state prison in Norco, California.
This Scripps College program is presented in partnership with the Holmes Performing Arts Fund, Justice Education at the Claremont Colleges, and Scripps Presents.
Saturday, November 9, 1:30 p.m., Lenzner Family Art Gallery, Pitzer College, 1050 N Mills Avenue, Claremont.
Join us for an opportunity to see Degrees of Visibility and participate in a workshop that builds on ideas presented in Practicing Abolition 1 (October 13). From Los Angeles, meet at Chuco’s Justice Center at 11:00 a.m., where there will be a brief tour, and carpool to Pitzer College for the exhibition and workshop in the Lenzner Family Art Gallery at 1:30 p.m. RSVP required: [email protected]
Carceral Geographies of Southern California
Thursday, December 5, 6:00 p.m.-8:00 p.m., Lenzner Family Art Gallery, Pitzer College, 1050 N Mills Avenue, Claremont.
A roundtable with Vonya Quarles (Starting Over Inc & All of Us or None), Amber-Rose Howard (Californians United for a Responsible Budget), Hilda Cruz from (Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity), and Dylan Rodriguez (UC Riverside), and moderation by Ashley Hunt.
Critical Resistance LA presents: Annual Prisoner Solidarity Postcard Event and Holiday Book Sale
Each year during the holidays, CR sends over 7,000 postcards to imprisoned supporters and readers of The Abolitionist newspaper. A family-friendly event with food, desserts, kids activities, live music and DJs.
WORLD IS WATCHING – MANIFESTO
You must be logged in to post a comment.