SF/Arts Curator Insight

Seeing Through Stone brings together artwork by contemporary artists working across mediums whose work engages prisons, justice and freedom. More than an exhibition examining prison from a purely observational perspective, Seeing Through Stone centers artists intent on envisioning abolition in practice, a global network of care and abolitionist world-building.
Bringing together artwork by over 40 artists and collectives including 14 new commissions, Seeing Through Stone features works that reflect the global scope of carceral conditions and the movements resisting prisons worldwide. Regarding poet Etheridge Knight’s evocation of those who have “the secret eyes”—Seeing Through Stone highlights the works of artists, including those who are formerly and currently incarcerated, that offer a vision beyond carceral systems, drawing out the flourishing collective story and alternative imagining currently underway in creating a future free of prisons.