Is art now trying to have a discussion about race?
If you ask multimedia artist Titus Kaphar, whose visit to mugshots.com to search for his father’s name led to the now-famous Jerome Project, he will give you an unequivocal yes and answer, simply, “there’s art in that.”
Or New Haven teen Ruby Gonzales, whose discovery of the inscription “freedom is relative,” scraped into the paint with a single fingernail on the back of a bathroom door at the Bridgeport Correctional Facility, inspired her to make one of her most moving pieces of art in her young career.
Those reactions — and those of artists, student apprentices, and Artspace staff in Artspace’s annual Summer Apprenticeship Program (SAP) — were front and center on this week’s episode of WNHH radio’s “Urban Talk Radio” with Shafiq Abdussabur, who sat down with Artspace director Helen Kauder and Gonzales, one of 17 SAP 2015 participants, to talk about Artspace’s current exhibition Arresting Patterns: Race and the Criminal Justice System. To hear more about the exhibition, including Kauder and Abdussabur’s plug for a two-day symposium this weekend, click on the audio above or find the episode in iTunes or on any podcast app under “WNHH Community Radio.”
And click on the above sound file to listen to a separate interview about the project with Leland Moore, one of the curators of “Arresting Patterns,” with Betsy Kim on her “Law, Life, and Culture” program on WNHH.
