Description
“ANGOLA, LA: Pandemic at the Penitentiary” (acrylic paint, oil/wax crayon, and pencil on heavy watercolor paper) confronts the collision of public health, incarceration, and racial injustice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prompted by reports that people who tested positive for COVID-19 were transferred to Angola Prison’s shuttered Camp J—a notorious former isolation unit—the work considers the fear and vulnerability produced by confinement during a health crisis. Located on the site of a former plantation and among the nation’s largest maximum-security prisons, Angola carries an enduring legacy of racialized forced labor and incarceration. Its prison rodeo and plantation-scale landscape further underscore the disturbing coexistence of spectacle, punishment, and history that the work brings into view.
