Installation view of "The Writing on the Wall"
The Writing on the Wall, a collaborative installation between the visual artist and alum of the Department of Photography and Imaging Hank Willis Thomas (BFA '98) and the professor and journalist Baz Dreisinger of John Jay College, was awarded a $150,000 grant from the Agnes Gund Art for Justice Fund.
The installation is made from essays, poems, letters, stories, diagrams and notes written by individuals in prison around the world, from America and Australia to Brazil, Norway and Uganda. The hand-written and typed pieces were accrued by Dr. Dreisinger during her years teaching in US and international prisons, in the context of both the Prison-to-College Pipeline program she founded at John Jay and her forthcoming book Incarceration Nations: Journeying to Justice in Prisons Around the World.
The Art for Justice Fund, which was launched by philanthropist and collector Agnes Gund last year, awarded almost $10 million to thirty-eight recipients in its second round of grants. Working to advance criminal justice reform in the United States, Gund auctioned off a prized work by Roy Lichtenstein in January 2017 and used $100 million of the proceeds to jump-start the initiative.
For more information and to see the full list of grantees, please click the link below.