SEEN: Extras | Weisman Art Museum

Resource

SEEN: Extras

February 8, 2025

Four people stand in front of a spring green wall with seven ink drawings installed on it.

The Weisman Art Museum presents SEEN, an exhibition created as part of a years-long collaboration with We Are All Criminals (WAAC), curated by WAAC director and founder, Emily Baxter. This page offers a collection of supplemental "extras" to enhance the experience of the artworks in the gallery and to provide additional context for the artists who are part of this exhibition.

Bino reads "Cramped Spaces"

Bino reads "Fire in the Hole"

Reading & Reflection Index curated by the Weisman's Public Engagement and Learning department

Download the SEEN Self-Guided Tour

The Sweetgrass Prayers poem by Louise Waakaa'igan

What's in your bin? featured essay by Erin Sharkey

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

SEEN features currently incarcerated artists in collaboration with artists, activists, and academics in the Twin Cities community. Together they explore issues of incarceration, isolation, healing, and coming home. Representing a range of cultural, personal, and professional backgrounds and diverse forms of artistic expression, people on the “inside” partnered with people on the “outside” based on shared creative curiosities and personal affinities. This exhibition is arranged across two galleries to evoke the experiences of “inside” (carceral) and “outside” (healing and community).

The seven installations stretch the bounds of the museum as a site for community engagement and critical examination of American carceral institutions. Teams worked together to better understand and explore carceral isolation and trauma and the many ways it has caused generational harm in their own bodies and those of their descendants. To bring healing to the cycle of harm, the participants connect with their families, the community, and each other through this exhibition.

Featured artists: B Batchelor and Emily Baxter; Sarith Peou and Carl Flink; Ronald “Bino” Greer II and Diane Willow; Lennell “Fresh” Martin and Erin Sharkey; Von Johnson and D.A. Bullock; Jeffery Young, C Fausto Cabrera, and Korina Barry; and Fong Lee and Kevin Yang.

SEEN is supported in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Art Dealers Association of America Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. General operating support is generously provided by Ameriprise Financial and the Art and Martha Kaemmer Fund of HRK Foundation. Special thanks to the KHR McNeely Family Foundation, thanks to Kevin, Rosemary, and Hannah Rose McNeely, for their support of the Weisman’s exhibitions and exhibition-related programming.

We Are All Criminals

About the Organization

We Are All Criminals

We Are All Criminals is a catalyst for conversations about race, class, privilege, and punishment. One in four people in the United States±—and one in four in Minnesota—carries a criminal record, yet four in four have a criminal history. Our criminal legal system disparately targets Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, and people experiencing poverty, resulting in higher rates and weights of criminal records. It’s no small number of individuals and families affected, and to no small degree: permanent and public criminal records perpetuate inequities in housing, employment, and education all of which precludes millions of people from countless opportunities to move on and move up. We at WAAC use first-person narrative, photography, law, and statistics, to humanize and shift the narratives of crime, privilege, policy interpretation and implementation, and redemption.

Mass incarceration is dependent upon the ignoring and erasure of the human beings we cage. Projects like SEEN challenge that. In collaboration with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, Weisman Art Museum, and the thoughtful and deeply gifted writers and artists on the inside, WAAC disrupts mass incarceration by clearing the pathways for people behind bars to have their voices heard, faces seen, and humanity recognized—and for people on the outside to reckon with the inhumanity of our country’s mass incarceration mass disaster.