Carving Out Rights by Artists from Stateville Prison
Medium: Screenprints
Size: set of 30 12” x 18” prints
Artist statement: “Inside prisons across the U.S., incarcerated people struggle everyday for their basic rights, claiming again and again their status as human beings. Here, within the largest democracy in the world (conditional though it may be), incarcerated people suffer indignities from terrible living conditions to physical and sexual violence, all under the aegis of justice.
As a tool to discuss the limits and ideals of human rights within a carceral state, artists at Stateville Prison, who struggle daily for their own human rights, created block prints of each article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The process of drawing, carving, and inking each print created the time and space for artists to critique and reflect on the ways the declaration is simultaneously aspirational, strategic, and fraught with the legacy of the violence of its founding states. For universal human rights to be relevant, it is essential that the most impacted people be heard and their vision of human rights centered.
This project includes an exhibition featuring the 30 brilliantly crafted prints of each article from the declaration. The work is also presented as a book, with prints illustrated alongside essays and poems. The artists and authors ask essential questions of what it means to build a culture of human rights from below rather than institute rights from above. What happens when people denied their rights begin to reimagine and carve them out once again?
This project was inspired by Meredith Stern’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights print project and developed in a class taught by Aaron Hughes through the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project.”
Image description: Print Portfolio of each of the 30 articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
