America's Mythic Time
America's Mythic Time
February 8th -
March 21st , 2020
America’s Mythic Time confronts mass incarceration and forms of opposition in collaboration with ArchCity Defenders featuring American Artist, Maria Gaspar, Kahlil Robert Irving, Jordan Weber, WORK/PLAY and ephemera from a range of St. Louis-based activists and organizers including Close the Workhouse and The Bail Project, among others.
Opening Reception:
February 28th from 7 - 9 pm
Referencing Hortense Spillers’s notion of “mythic time” - a seizing of both time and bodies that sanctions continued exclusion and violence - the exhibition presses the ways in which over-policing and incarceration devastate communities of color, but also poses that forms of liberation originate within these communities.
In collaboration with civil rights law firm ArchCity Defenders, The Luminary presents America’s Mythic Time, an exhibition focused on the devastating impacts of racial profiling, police brutality, and mass incarceration on the poor and communities of color, as well as forms of resistance and liberation both through the legal system and within community organizing and artists’ efforts. The exhibition particularly explores carceral capitalism as seen in the steady expansion of for-profit prisons, cash bail, modern day debtors’ prisons, and workhouse jails with health-destroying conditions in St. Louis and nationwide.
America’s Mythic Time, curated by James McAnally with Katherine Simóne Reynolds, brings together significant works from American Artist, Maria Gaspar, Kahlil Robert Irving, Jordan Weber, WORK/PLAY and ephemera from a range of St. Louis-based activists and organizers including Close the Workhouse and The Bail Project, among others. The exhibition will be extended through public programs developed by ArchCity Defenders, including Booked: A Reading Library on Racism in Policing, Courts and Jails, a screening of Wade Gardner's documentary film Marvin Booker Was Murdered on February 27th at 7pm, and a public Close the Workhouse session at the Deaconess Foundation on March 5th.
Founded in 2009, ArchCity Defenders has grown from a firm of three volunteer lawyers to a full fledged holistic legal advocacy organization with 26 staff. Since its founding, ArchCity has represented thousands of people in nearly every municipal court in the region, as well as filed broad civil rights lawsuits challenging underlying abuses like inhumane jail conditions, inadequate homeless shelter, cash bail, and modern day debtors’ prisons. This exhibition is meant to extend Arch City Defenders’ ongoing work, bringing together the work of artists, activists, organizers and legal advocates to create a resonant and urgent exhibition on one of our region and nation’s most dire crises.