Exhibiting the System

In early 2016, artists Andrea Fraser and Cameron Rowland each opened exhibitions in New York City that confronted mass incarceration through artistic languages rooted in conceptual art. In the Whitney Museum’s cavernous fifth-floor gallery, Fraser installed a sound piece composed of recordings from Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Simultaneously, at Artists Space, Rowland exhibited objects manufactured by incarcerated laborers in prison factories across New York State. Responding to activism and scholarship directed against mass incarceration—and to the art world’s growing engagement with carceral aesthetics—these exhibitions forged metonymic links between cultural institutions and the prison-industrial complex. In doing so, they invited viewers to reflect on the ties that connect both museums and prisons to neoliberal capitalism and systemic racism.

This paper situates these works within two intersecting currents: a shift within activism and scholarship toward framing injustice as socially and systemically endemic, and a critical effort to view art institutions as components of broader structures of societal control. Drawing in part on earlier notions of “the museum as prison,” they extend this trope to address concrete connections between elite institutions and the “human surplus” relegated to prisons. Moreover, in the tradition of institutional critique, they foreground historical and analytical frameworks central to the critique of mass incarceration. Finally, this paper asks whether this reflexive turn in carceral aesthetics does justice to these frameworks—and whether it can meaningfully engage the incommensurable worlds of incarceration and display.