TALKING BACK
Artists of the Columbia Collective
Juste-A, Jay, Marshmallow
September 3 — 25th
Foreland Contemporary Arts Campus
Foreland and the Juvenile Justice Arts and Media Network are pleased to present Talking Back: Artists of the Columbia Collective, a group exhibition channeling creativity as a form of agency, humor as insurgence, and joy as resistance within the juvenile justice system. Curated by Sofia Thieu, Talking Back features new site-specific works from the Columbia Collective: a multimedia group of young female and trans artists named after their previous facility, the New York Department of Corrections’ Columbia Secure Center for Girls in Claverack, New York. The Collective is now incarcerated at the maximum Brookwood Secure Center for Youth down the street, constructed in 1983 as one of eleven state juvenile facilities operated by the Office of Children and Family Services, and where individuals under 16 have been sentenced in adult criminal court.
Under the arts programming and mentorship of artist Maggie Hazen, the Columbia Collective was founded in 2019. Since then, the Collective—comprised of artists Jay, Juste-A, and Marshmallow—has turned to dynamic artistic practices to navigate their circumstances of incarceration. Taking its title from bell hooks’ 1989 novel, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, the exhibition explores defiant speech and the gallery space as a platform to “talk back” against a carceral system that silences these artists’ voices.
Press: Times Union , Chronogram, The Imprint, Bard College
Curatorial Essays by Sofia Thieu
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Juvenile Justice Arts and Media Network
Reading Room Book List
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Gallery
