How apropos for Halloween: I found three separate art exhibits that feature collage work exploring the horror shows of American prisons and politics. (Seriously, if you’re having trouble sleeping these days, you might want to avoid the following images.)
Chris Santa Maria, “PRESIDENT TRUMP”
If you want one gigantic scare, Chris Santa Maria’s enormous collage should do the job. For four years, the artist collected thousands of Trump and Trump-era-media images to make “PRESIDENT TRUMP.” His Instagram account says he’ll be adding even more to the six-by-six-feet piece during the last weekend before Election Day.
This next collage is only letter-sized, but it might as well be larger-than-life.
James “Yaya” Hough, “Untitled”
Not one, but two exhibits prominently feature collage works about the prison industrial complex. The collage above is part of “Rendering Justice” at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Curator Jesse Krimes gathered work by incarcerated artists, as well as those whose art practice focuses on the impact of prison on all of us. Krimes and four other artists in this exhibit are also showing work in “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration” at MoMA PS1 in New York.
Gilberto Rivera, “An Institutional Nightmare”
Still with me? This last exhibit has absolutely nothing to do with the previously-mentioned American nightmares: it’s not even in this country.
John Stezaker, “The Trial”
To see “The Trial” and other works in person, you’d have to go London (the one in England) to visit “At the Edge of Pictures: John Stezaker, Works 1975-1990.” As the title suggests, this is old-school artwork that’s closer to the Surrealist movement than the remixing born from hip-hop. Unsurprisingly, these works feature no references to people of color (as if there were no Black Britons before 1990), which brings me right back to the present. Worldwide protests are connecting Black and brown lives in jeopardy to the art world and election-year politics. I can’t think of anything much scarier this Halloween than this kind of oppression and exclusion.