Abolition and Art: The Future is Feeling Human
Saturday, April 17, session 1
Workshop A: 10:15 - 11:15 AM PST
This workshop creates space to dream of abolition while directly confronting systems that routinely treat freedom as a scarcity. We will use art as a platform for liberatory memory work, deconstructing and reconstructing privilege, and centering each person’s humanity in visions of the future. Participants will repurpose litigation documents for the artmaking process, demystifying aspects of the legal system and transforming them into frameworks for creating abolitionist change. In the course of an hour, we will work as a group to build community art that engages written, visual, and/ or audio components. Each project will build upon the other, and we will ground each activity in moments of individual reflection and larger group discussion.
facilitators
Savannah Kumar
Savannah Kumar is a civil rights lawyer with the ACLU of Texas, a community artist, and an Archival Creator Fellow with the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). Savannah is committed to using a range of advocacy strategies to deconstruct carceral systems and build a world of healing, support, gentleness, and liberation. Savannah serves on the board of directors of Justice Arts Coalition (supporting the work of incarcerated artists) and the Amala Foundation (running youth peacebuilding programs in public schools in Texas). Savannah recently had a solo show at Prizer Arts & Letters Gallery in Austin, Texas and Savannah’s writing on solitary confinement, forced labor, and creative resistance was published in the most recent volume of the Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal.
Murphy Anne Carter
Murphy Anne Carter is an Operations Aide for Casa Marianella, a shelter for asylum seekers in Austin, Texas. After years of teaching creative writing at Travis County Correctional Complex and serving as executive director of Freehand Arts Project, Murphy also works as an Oral History Interviewer and Project Coordinator for the Texas After Violence Project. Having taught nearly every age, from PreK to the elderly, Murphy believes in community storytelling, narrative power, and memory work as transformative, abolitionist tools for both the personal and political. She recently graduated from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and continues to pursue justice in federal, state, and local carceral systems.