Ashley Hunt

Hunt studied Studio Art and Music at U.C. Irvine{{Cite web |title=Noritaka Minami MFA 2011 and Ashley Hunt BA 1994 awarded Graham Foundation Grant {{!}} Claire Trevor School of the Arts {{!}} UC Irvine |url=https://www.arts.uci.edu/noritaka-minami-mfa-2011-and-ashley-hunt-ba-1994-awarded-graham-foundation-grant |access-date=2022-05-25 |website=www.arts.uci.edu|date=17 April 2018 }} and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,{{Cite web |title=SAIC Faculty and Alumni Awarded Individual Graham Foundation Grants |url=https://www.saic.edu/news/saic-community-awarded-individual-graham-foundation-grants |access-date=2022-05-25 |website=School of the Art Institute of Chicago |language=en}} and he was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program.{{Cite web |title=Independent Study Program (ISP) |url=https://whitney.org/research/isp |access-date=2022-05-25 |website=whitney.org |language=en}} He was faculty and co-chair of the Visual Art program at Vermont College of Fine Arts from 2008–2015,{{Cite web |title=In Residence – Visual Ark |url=https://visualark.vcfa.edu/2015/11/06/in-residence/ |access-date=2022-05-25 |website=visualark.vcfa.edu}} and he has served as faculty in the Photo and Media Program at CalArts since 2008, where he also served as program director from 2010–2019.

Ashes Ashes was commissioned for the exhibition, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, curated by Nicole Fleetwood. It is a two-channel video and accompanying publication that attempts an abolitionist imagining, asking the viewer to envision “cages as ruins,”{{Cite web |title=Nicole R. Fleetwood {{!}} Aperture {{!}} Winter 2020 |url=https://issues.aperture.org/article/2020/4/4/nicole-r-fleetwood |access-date=2022-06-07 |website=Aperture {{!}} The Complete Archive |language=en-US}} considering the scheduled closure of New York City’s Rikers Island as its starting point. Interviews with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Shana Agid, Dalaeja Foreman, Sophia Gurulé, Pilar Maschi and other members of New York’s former No New Jails Coalition, provide soundtrack to the wandering of Hunt’s camera through wild sections of the shorelines that surround Rikers, observing plants, trees, wildlife and industrial remains. These passages are interrupted by sequences with narration performed by artist, Alia Ali, over archival film and collections of stereographic photographs that capture the time of Rikers’ beginnings, addressing its namesake’s involvement in the slave trade and the island’s expansion by vast landfills of ash — burnt garbage brought from New York’s 19th century modern life, upon which the jail complex sits today. With the refrain, “When Rikers Island was covered in cages,” the jail complex is referred to entirely in the past tense. The film’s epilogue extends its questions to the effects of COVID-19 and the escalated calls for abolition that interrupted the film’s making, following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, calls that built upon the decades of activism by people like the film’s Gilmore and Agid, Angela Davis and many more.{{Cite web |last=Furlong |first=Adriana |date=2021-03-09 |title=Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration |url=https://brooklynrail.org/2021/03/artseen/Marking-Time-Art-in-the-Age-of-Mass-Incarceration |access-date=2022-06-07 |website=The Brooklyn Rail |language=en-US}} Ashes Ashes “ruminate upon the 2026 scheduled end of Rikers, a non-linear mapping of the history seeped into its tainted ground so as to excavate a hope of abolition. In this way, Hunt treats as malleable the conditions of oppression that oftentimes feel permanent, and leans into a distant, yet fixed indeterminacy that promises celebratory emancipation.”{{Cite web |title=Carceral Aesthetics {{!}} Commonweal Magazine |url=https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/carceral-aesthetics |access-date=2022-06-07 |website=www.commonwealmagazine.org |date=16 March 2021 |language=en}}

Degrees of Visibility is a large body of landscape photographs made in locations throughout the fifty U.S. states and territories, documenting the spaces in which prisons, jails and detention centers are embedded. Each image is photographed from publicly accessible points of view, studying the ways prisons are presented and camouflaged within our everyday life.{{Cite web |date=2018-04-01 |title=Ashley Hunt: Degrees of Visibility |url=https://southwestcontemporary.com/ashley-hunt-degrees-of-visibility/ |access-date=2022-06-07 |website=Southwest Contemporary |language=en-US}}{{Cite web |date=2018-10-26 |title=Ashley Hunt: Degrees of Visibility |url=https://undermain.art/visual-arts/ashley-hunt-degrees-of-visibility-bolivar-gallery/ |access-date=2022-06-07 |website=UnderMain |language=en-US}} Hunt’s theory is that this erasure of contributes to an aesthetics of mass incarceration, whereby the concealment of punishment relieves citizens of their responsibility to it, and is one of the things that allows the system to grow, and in a way that engages “carceral geographies.”{{Cite web |title=Ashley Hunt's Photos Explore the Aesthetics of Mass Incarceration |url=https://blog.calarts.edu/2016/04/21/ashley-hunts-photos-explore-the-aesthetics-of-mass-incarceration/ |access-date=2022-06-07 |website=24700 |date=21 April 2016 |language=en-US}}{{Cite web |date=2017-06-07 |title=Photo Exhibit "Degrees of Visibility" Surveys U.S. Prison System, Opens in San Francisco {{!}} Post News Group |url=https://www.postnewsgroup.com/photo-exhibit-degrees-of-visibility%e2%80%a8-surveys-u-s-prison-system-opens-in-san-francisco/ |access-date=2022-06-07 |website=www.postnewsgroup.com |language=en-US}}{{Cite book |last=Fleetwood |first=Nicole |title=Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration |publisher=Harvard University Press |year=2020 |location=Cambridge, Massachusetts |pages=49–50}} Hunt builds each exhibition of Degrees of Visibility in dialogue with local community organizations, which resulted in workshops, public talks, campaign events,{{Cite web |title=Center for Political Education |url=https://politicaleducation.org/ |access-date=2022-06-22 |website=Center for Political Education |language=en-US}}{{Cite web |title=Critical Resistance |url=https://criticalresistance.org/profiles-abolition/atlanta/ |access-date=2022-06-22 |website=Critical Resistance |date=7 October 2016 |language=en-US}} and a series of free newspapers that Hunt produces of their conversations.{{Cite web |title=DEGREES OF VISIBILITY – Alabama Contemporary Art Center |url=https://www.alabamacontemporary.org/events/degrees-of-visibility/ |access-date=2022-06-07 |website=www.alabamacontemporary.org}} This has included the organizations Critical Resistance, Project South, Southerners On New Ground, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, All of Us or None, Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), Take Back Cheapside, the Underground Scholars, has been exhibited at Wonderroot in Atlanta, the Alabama Contemporary, Coleman Center for the Arts, Foto Forum Santa Fe, the Bolivar Art Gallery of the University of Kentucky, and the Eric Quezada Center for Culture and Politics, and it has been included in the exhibitions Walls Turned Sideways and Visualizing Abolition.

Notes on the Emptying of a City is a performance and book based upon Hunt’s time as part of a delegation of activists to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, calling for an investigation into the Sheriff’s refusal to evacuate the Orleans Parish Prison, the imprisoned people reported to have drown in their cells, and the reported abuses during survivors’ transfer to prisons around Louisiana.{{Cite web |title=Ashley Hunt: Notes on the Emptying of a City {{!}} Hammer Museum |url=https://hammer.ucla.edu/programs-events/2012/07/ashley-hunt-notes-on-the-emptying-of-a-city |access-date=2022-06-08 |website=hammer.ucla.edu |date=11 July 2012 |language=en}} The performance built upon the material Hunt originally incorporated into the short video, “I Won’t Drown on that Levee and You Ain’t Gonna’ Break My Back” (2006), which was the centerpiece for the Campaign for Amnesty for Prisoners of Katrina.Pelot-Hobbs, Lydia. "Amnesty for All: Organizing against Criminalization in Post-Katrina New Orleans." Southern Cultures, vol. 27 no. 3, 2021, p. 98-118. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/scu.2021.0046. A hybrid work that Hunt describes as “a dismantled film,”{{Cite web |date=2012-09-10 |title=Notes on "Notes on the Emptying of a City": An Interview with Ashley Hunt |url=https://fringearts.com/2012/09/10/notes-on-notes-on-the-emptying-of-a-city-an-interview-with-ashley-hunt/ |access-date=2022-06-08 |website=FringeArts |language=en-US}} it combines his own live narration with video of interviews he conducted, footage of a press conference in front of the jail and a “right to return” march and protest held by community organizations and displaced survivors of the storm, while theorizing the building of racism into architecture, planning, policing, gentrification, and state responses to disasters, or disaster capitalism.{{Cite web |title=Social Practice Art's identity crisis {{!}} Bad at Sports |url=https://badatsports.com/2011/social-practice-arts-identity-crisis/ |access-date=2022-06-08 |language=en-US}} It includes the voices of Xochitl Bervera, Joe Cook, Althea Francois, Tamika Middleton, and Malik Rahim, from organizations including Common Ground, Critical Resistance, Friends and Families of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, Human Rights Watch, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, and American Civil Liberties Union of New Orleans. The performance was later made into a book, designed by Laura Fields, and published by Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the performance was presented at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the Philly Fringe Festival, Threewalls Gallery, Project Row Houses, Center for Contemporary Art Santa Fe, the University of Texas at El Paso, the New Museum, Woodbourne Correctional Facility (NY), Putnamville Correctional Facility (IN), and the Arika 12 Performance Festival in Glasgow.

A World Map: In Which We See... is a conceptual map and accompanying workshop that Hunt created in 2003 to understand statelessness within contemporary globalization. By mapping relationships between two critical discourses in the early 2000s, that of anti-globalization movement as it found its expression in the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, and the anti-prison–industrial complex movement, which revolve in part around the figures of the refugee and the prisoner. Each, according to Hunt, offered a theory of statelessness and a stateless figure, as originally theorized after World War II by theorists like Hannah Arendt.Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Meridian Books, 1958. Print. Where Arendt writes, "The fundamental deprivation of human rights is manifested first and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective. […] We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation."

Originally designed digitally, its primary exhibition form is hand-rendered onto a chalkboard or wall. To shape public dialogue on the map, Hunt developed a workshop structure that would create the map in steps with an invited group of community members, leading to a completed map, and eventually a response work that came from the participants. A World Map was included in the Atlas of Radical Cartography, edited by Lize Mogel and Alexis Baghat, and was included in The Global Contemporary at ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Post-American LA at 18th Street Gallery in Los Angeles,{{Cite web |date=2009-08-28 |title=Art Review: 'Post-American L.A.' at 18th Street Arts Center |url=https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/08/art-review-postamerican-la-at-18th-street-arts-center.html |access-date=2022-06-08 |website=LA Times Blogs - Culture Monster |language=en-US}} Capital it Fails Us Now at UKS in Oslo, and Patriot, at the Baltimore Contemporary.

Corrections (2001) is a feature documentary, Hunt’s first work on the prison industrial complex, distributed by Third World Newsreel.{{Cite web |title=Screening of Ashley Hunt's Corrections |url=https://whitney.org/events/ashley-hunt |access-date=2022-06-07 |website=whitney.org |language=en}}{{Cite web |date=2001-10-01 |title=CORRECTIONS {{!}} Film Threat |url=https://filmthreat.com/uncategorized/corrections/ |access-date=2022-06-07 |language=en-US}}{{Cite web |last1=September 19 |first1=Curt Holman Wednesday |last2=Edt |first2=2001 12:04 Am |title=Profit and punishment |url=https://creativeloafing.com/content-172211-profit-and-punishment |access-date=2022-06-08 |website=Creative Loafing |language=en}} The film features narration and interviews with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Judy Greene, Christian Parenti, Rose Braz, Ellen Reddy, Helen Reddy, Joseph Dillon Davey, Harmon Wray, David Utter, Shannon Robshaw and others, set against a prison trade show, tours of prison construction sites, visits to department of corrections offices and private prison corporate headquarters, to protests and meetings with community organizers. Together, it looks to the forces behind the massive growth of the US prison system since 1968, as the prison population hits an unprecedented 2 million in the year 2000. The film offered a significant critique of the prison industrial complex that followed the activism galvanized by the first Critical Resistance conference in Berkeley in 1998, and it was both made in dialogue with activist organizations and toured alongside campaigns as a grassroots tool. This included a national grassroots tour funded by the Public Welfare Foundation, It was an official selection in numerous film festivals, including the Slamdance Film Festival, the Atlanta Film Festival, and the Birmingham Sidewalk Film Festival, multiple museum and gallery exhibitions internationally, and is in the collection of over fifty university and public libraries. The reception of Corrections and its engagement with the anti-prison activism of the early 2000s led to its elaboration in the Corrections Documentary Project, which includes ten additional short videos, Hunt's Prison Maps poster project, and study guides based upon his research.{{Cite journal |last=Sexton |first=Jared |date=2007 |title=Captivity, By Turns: A Comment on the Work of Ashley Hunt |url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043249.2007.10791270 |journal=Art Journal |volume=66 |issue=3 |pages=74–79|doi=10.1080/00043249.2007.10791270 |s2cid=194083472 |url-access=subscription }}

Hunt's Prison Maps are a set of two popular education posters, subtitled: "What is the Prison Industrial Complex?", and "What is the Historical Context for the Prison Industrial Complex?" Made to accompany Hunt's 2001 Corrections and incorporating the additional research that came from that project, they exist as an unlimited edition of free prints, often reprinted for exhibitions and community organizing contexts. They were the first of Hunt's projects using cartographic strategies to map discourses and concepts of contemporary politics, mass incarceration and globalization, which also include Order (For the Jena Six), A World Map: In Which We See..., As Flowers Turn Toward the Sun,

• 2005 – Patriot, Contemporary Museum, Baltimore
• 2006 – Look of Law, UC Irvine
• 2006 – Headquarters, Contemporary Museum Baltimore
• 2007 – documenta 12
• 2012 – Made in LA, Hammer Museum
• 2012 – The Global Contemporary
• 2012 – Sinopale, Sinop, Turkey
• 2013 – Maintenance Required, The Kitchen
• 2014 – To Shoot a Kite, Cue Art Foundation
• 2015 – Inside/Outside: Prison Narratives, Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art
• 2018 – Walls Turned Sideways, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
• 2018 – On the Inside Out, Monroe-Brown Gallery, Western Michigan University
• 2020 – Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, MoMA PS1
• 2020 – Visualizing Abolition, San Jose Museum of Art
• 2021 – Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration, ASU Art Museum

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Category:Living people

Category:1970 births

Category:Photographers from Los Angeles

Category:American video artists

Category:Prison abolitionists

Category:American prison reformers

Category:University of California, Irvine alumni

Category:School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni

Category:California Institute of the Arts faculty