States of Incarceration: Seeking Asylum, Resisting Detention
October 18 - December 15, 2017
Featured Artists: Lizania Cruz, Samer Fouad, Jon Gomez, and Ann J. Lewis
Project for Empty Space in collaboration with the Humanities Action Lab (HAL), Newest Americans, Rutgers University-Newark's Graduate Program in American Studies, and First Friends of NJ and NY presented States of Incarceration and Seeking Asylum, Resisting Detention. The project was the Newark iteration of States of Incarceration, a traveling exhibition that was created by students, returning citizens, and others directly affected by mass incarceration in 20 cities. Each city’s team explored local histories of mass incarceration and represented their findings in this collective national project.
The Newark chapter of the States of Incarceration national exhibit was created by Rutgers University-Newark graduate students led by Dr. Mary Rizzo, which focused on the Elizabeth Detention Center (EDC). In the mid-1990s, as concerns about terrorism and growing numbers of asylum seekers rose, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service contracted Esmor Correctional Services to open a detention facility in Elizabeth, NJ, for immigrants deemed to be in the United States illegally. After detainees’ complaints about inhumane conditions and a hunger strike were ignored, nearly 100 detainees, mostly men from Africa, “rioted" in June 1995, breaking furniture and windows. An assessment by INS discovered that “detainees were subjected to harassment, verbal abuse, and other degrading actions perpetrated by Esmor guards” who had been poorly trained and supervised. Soon after, Somali asylum seeker Hawa Jama and 9 other detainees became plaintiffs in Jama v. Esmor Correctional Services, the first time detainees were given the right to sue a private corporation. The 2007 settlement awarded damages to the plaintiffs and Esmor was removed as the operator of the EDC. The hunger strike, uprising, and lawsuit illustrated ways that detainees had protested the conditions of their detention.
Seeking Asylum, Resisting Detention expanded the local piece of the national exhibit through three additional components that examined the impact of immigrant detention in the Newark region.
Dr. Rizzo and graduate student Dahlia Azran, worked with First Friends of NJ & NY, a detainee advocacy and support group, to curate a collection of art created by detainees while in detention in northern New Jersey. This work spoke directly to the lived experience of those who had gone through the process of this incarceration. Many of these pieces were composed of non-traditional materials such as candy wrappers, toilet paper, food-based ink, and other scraps of utilitarian objects. In many cases, discarded paraphernalia were some of the only materials available to detainees to use in creative endeavors. This portion of the exhibition demonstrated how detainees used art to resist the dehumanization of imprisonment, sought refuge and found solace, and expressed gratitude to the listeners who heard their stories.
Newest Americans--a collaborative storytelling project led by partners Talking Eyes Media, VII Photo and the Center for Migration and the Global City at Rutgers-Newark--produced eight photographic portraits by founding partner Ed Kashi of people who were detained between 1996 and the present, and conducted interviews with the subjects about their experience in detention and their lives since they were released. Kashi’s life-sized portraits featured former detainees who firmly stood their ground even while their physical settings seemed to be receding from them, as though they were there and not there, at home and adrift, uncertain of their place in America. These portraits were accompanied by recorded accounts from the detainees, who phone visitors back when texted via cellphone.
Another collection of artwork, which was curated by Project For Empty Space’s Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Pauline Jampol, was comprised of pieces by four artists, Lizania Cruz, Samer Fouad, Jon Gomez, and Ann J. Lewis (GILF). Each artist linked the precariousness of people with an undocumented status in the United States to the larger threat of the carceral state. Cruz’s Flower for Immigration photographic triptych, which was part of an ongoing interactive project, gave a platform and a voice to a community of often invisible flower-sellers and arrangers who were undocumented by asking them to speak about their parlous status in the United States. Gomez’s multi-channel video work explored the risks people are willing to undertake to immigrate to the United States, and posed the question ‘is it worth it?’ and ‘what is the American dream?’ Similarly, Fouad’s large-scale collage panels, which featured comparative and parallel narratives of the American Japanese internment camps of the 1940s and the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim rhetoric of today, also dissected the legacy of how America treats its immigrant communities. GILF’s work, which lived in the concourse beyond the gallery, highlighted activists at the vanguard of the immigrant rights movement.
The exhibition opening coincided with a three day convening at Express Newark during which HAL’s partners from around the world gathered in Newark to continue to build on their collective vision for States of Incarceration and to conceptualize HAL’s new project on environmental/climate justice.
About the Exhibition Partners
Humanities Action Lab: The Humanities Action Lab (HAL) is a coalition of universities, issue organizations, and public spaces in 20 cities, and growing, that collaborate to produce community-curated public humanities projects on urgent social issues. Students and stakeholders in each city develop local chapters of national traveling exhibits, web projects, public programs, and other platforms for civic engagement. Local Newark programming for States of Incarceration, HAL’s first project, is made possible in part by the generous gifts from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
Newest Americans: Newest Americans is an innovative media and documentary project chronicling the immigrant experience from the vantage point of the campus of Rutgers University-Newark (RU-N), which U.S. News & World Report has designated the most diverse national university every year since 1997. The project cross-pollinates academic inquiry, professional media production and public humanities programming to generate fresh narratives and insights about our emerging majority minority population and the nation it is transforming. Newest Americans media has been published widely (by the New York Times, National Geographic, and The Atlantic, among others) and has been screened at numerous film and photo festivals, most recently as the opening night feature at Photoville. With the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Community Conversations grant, Newest Americans is developing a neighborhood histories project in Newark and national curriculum on post-1965 immigrant communities.
First Friends of NJ & NY: The mission of First Friends of NJ & NY is to uphold the inherent dignity and humanity of detained immigrants and asylum seekers. The organization provides compassion and hope through volunteer visitations, resettlement assistance and advocacy.
Rutgers University-Newark Graduate Program in American Studies: An interdisciplinary graduate program offering an MA with a track in Public Humanities and a PhD, the Graduate Program in American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark is committed to social justice through scholarship that matters to communities. Our faculty and students lead and participate in projects including the Humanities Action Lab, Queer Newark Oral History Project, Newest Americans, Telling Untold Histories Unconference, among others.
SOI EVENTS:
States of Incarceration: Conversations on Confronting the Carceral State
Wednesday, November 1st
PES held a discussion that addressed the carceral state through the artist’s lens for the project States of Incarceration. The conversation included artists Ed Kashi, Jon Gomez, Juliet Horton and Samer Fouad whose work was developed for the Newark iteration of States of Incarceration: Seeking Asylum, Resisting Detention.
States of Incarceration was a travelling exhibition created by students, returning citizens, and others directly affected by mass incarceration. This iteration focused on the Elizabeth Detention Center (EDC), opened in the mid-1990s, as concerns about terrorism and growing numbers of asylum seekers rose. The US Immigration and Naturalization Service contracted Esmor Correctional Services to open a detention facility in Elizabeth, NJ, for immigrants deemed to be in the United States illegally. In 1995, after an immeasurable number of complaints regarding the inhuman conditions of the detainment center, there was an upheaval amongst the detainees that resulted in the case, Jama v. Esmor Correctional Services. Each artist responds to this incident, examining the impact of immigrant detention in the Newark region.
Kashi’s life-sized portraits featured former detainees who firmly stood their ground even while their physical settings seem to be receding from them, as though they were there and not there, at home and adrift, uncertain of their place in America. Gómez’s multi-channel video work explored the risks people are willing to undertake to immigrate to the United States, and posed the question ‘is it worth it?’ and ‘what is the American dream?’ Similarly, Fouad’s large-scale collage panels, which featured comparative and parallel narratives of the American Japanese internment camps of the 1940s and the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim rhetoric of today, also dissected the legacy of how America treats its immigrant communities.
Juliet Horton, a former detainee, exhibited a series of drawings she completed while incarcerated at the Hudson County Jail and Hartford Correctional Center. She was detained for 2 years, 9 months. After being separated from her 5-month year old son, Horton used art as a means to express her identity as a mother. She helped other women express their motherhood by drawing them with their estranged children. Her work depicted the need for detainees to re-define themselves as mothers in a system that disconnected them from their families.
Mobilizing Resistance Against White NationalismSponsored by Newest Americans
Monday, November 13th
In conjunction with the States of Incarceration exhibit, Mobilizing Resistance Against White Nationalism was a public forum that sought to provide concrete intersectional strategies and tactics for resistance to the threat to rescind DACA, and the increasingly robust efforts by the Trump administration to detain, deport and ban a wide variety of immigrants. The forum also explored the administration’s policies and enforcement priorities as a symptom of the increasingly visible and influential white nationalist movement in the United States.
Panelists:
Marisol Conde- Hernandez, J.D. was the first openly undocumented college student in New Jersey, the co-founder of the NJ Dream Act Coalition. Upon receiving her Juris Doctorate from the Rutgers University-Newark Law School became the first openly undocumented immigrant from New Jersey to receive a law degree.
Rev. Moacir Weirich was born and grew up in Brazil, where he studied theology at the Escola Superior de Teolgia. He was ordained at Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil. He arrived in Newark, NJ in 1997 to serve together with his wife, Rev. Maristela Freiberg, a start a ministry of the ELCA. In 2009 St. Stephan’s Grace Community was organized and incorporated as a new congregation of the ELCA.
Sahar Aziz – Professor of Law and Chancellor's Social Justice Scholar. Professor Aziz’s scholarship examines the intersections of national security, race, and civil rights with a focus on the adverse impact of national security laws and policies on racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in the U.S.
Giancarlo Tello - Originally from Peru, Giancarlo’s tireless advocacy led to the passage of a law that allowed New Jersey’s undocumented students to pay in-state tuition at state universities. Having navigated countless hurdles created by our broken immigration system to graduate from community college and Rutgers University-Newark, Giancarlo knows first-hand the obstacles to opportunity undocumented students face. His tireless advocacy as part of the Tuition Equity for Dreamers Coalition earned Giancarlo high-praise and much respect from the immigrant advocacy community.
Hourie Tafech made her way out of a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon to pursue an education in Malta. While in Malta on a student visa, Hourie also confronted the challenge of being a refugee and student in this European Union Member State. In response, Hourie co-founded Spark 15 to work with young refugees to facilitate their participation in society and become active members of the Maltese community. Spark 15 also promotes education on refugee issues within Malta.
Esder Chong was an undergraduate at Rutgers University-Newark pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Public and Nonprofit Administration. Esder founded the student-led organization RU Dreamers to activate the voices of undocumented immigrants within the Rutgers Newark Campus.
About Newest Americans
Newest Americans is an innovative art and documentary project chronicling the immigrant experience from the vantage point of the campus of Rutgers University-Newark (RU-N), which U.S. News & World Report has designated the most diverse national university every year since 1997. The project cross-pollinates academic inquiry, professional media production and public humanities programming to generate fresh narratives and insights about our emerging majority minority population and the nation it is transforming.