SaveArtSpace has partnered with Art At A Time Like This to present artworks on billboards and bus shelters in Miami, FL, entitled 8X5, the size of an average prison cell, the exhibition will be spread across 25 billboards and bus shelters located near courthouses and government offices to provoke a dialogue about the U.S. criminal justice system.

8X5 will feature commissioned works by leading contemporary artists: Faylita Hicks, Guerrilla Girls, Shephard Fairey, Sam Durant, Sherrill Roland and Trenton Doyle Hancock. Curated by Barbara Pollack & Anne Verhallen, of Art At A Time Like This.

“End Mass Incarceration!” has become a widely repeated political slogan, yet change and reform has stalled time and again. This exhibition does not just repeat the well-known fact that the U.S. is the leading incarcerator in the world. It delivers an indictment of the judicial system, a system that prevents many from receiving a fair trial. By placing comments and images in the public sphere–in close proximity to the offices of judges, prosecutors and administrators –this project can instigate a conversation with the chief activators engaged in practices contributing to mass incarceration.

The mission of this exhibition is to:

- Raise public awareness about the facts and statistics proving inequities in our judicial system.

- Instigate dialogue with judges and prosecutors by positioning billboards in close proximity to courthouses and government offices

- Provide artists with a platform to comment on this important issue

During the week of June 6, 2022, SaveArtSpace launched public art installations for each selected work on billboard and bus shelter ad spaces in Miami, FL. The public art will be on view for at least one month.

Selected Artists

Locations: SW 8th St & SW 32nd Ave / NW 37th Ave & NW 4th Terrace / NW 36th St & NW 21st Ct

Faylita Hicks (she/her/they) is a queer Black writer and directly-impacted organizer working with the social justice organization Mano Amiga, examining the impact of pretrial incarceration and cash bail on low-income people in rural counties through poetry, hip hop, mobile photography, op-eds, and essays.

Born in Los Angeles, CA, Hicks is based in San Marcos, TX. They have been awarded fellowships and residencies from Right of Return USA, Lambda Literary, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the 2020 Tin House Winter Workshop. They were a finalist for several annual awards, including the Palette Poetry Spotlight Award, the Cosmonauts Avenue Annual Poetry Prize, and the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship.

In December 2019, their pretrial incarceration story was featured in PBS’s Independent Lens Documentary Series and will be included in a new Brave New Films project. Faylita Hicks’s debut collection, HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), was a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award and work included has won Best of Net and nominations for the Pushcart Prize. 

Connect with Faylita Hicks on Instagram @faylitahicks.

Locations: SW 1st Ave & SW 1st St / NW 1st St & NW Miami Ct / W Flagler St & NW 2nd Ave / NW 7th St & NW 27th Ave / NW 12th Ave & NW 29th St

Born in 1984 in Asheville, North Carolina, Sherrill Roland studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2018) and earned his MFA and BFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2017 and 2009). For more than three years, Roland's right to self-determination was lost to a wrongful incarceration. After spending ten months in prison for a crime he was later exonerated for, he returned to his artistic practice, which he now uses as a vehicle for self-reflection and an outlet for emotional release.  He is represented by Tonya Bonakdar Gallery in NY.

Roland’s interdisciplinary practice deals with concepts of innocence, identity, and community; reimagining their social and political implications in the context of the American criminal justice system. Converting the haunting nuances of his experiences into drawings, sculptures, multimedia objects, performances, and participatory activities, Roland shares his story and creates space for others to do the same, illuminating the invisible costs, damages, and burdens of incarceration.

Roland is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award (2021); South Arts Southern Grand Prize & State Fellowship (2020); and was an Art for Justice Grantee (2020) in addition to many other awards and recognitions. He has had fellowships and residencies at Fountainhead, Miami; Duke University, Durham, NC; Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA; among others. 

Connect with Sherrill Roland on Instagram @sherrillroland.

Locations: Brickell Ave & SE 5th St / Brickell Ave & SE 5th St / SW 1st Ave & W Flagler St / W Flagler St & NW 6th Ave / Biscayne Blvd & NE 8th St / NW 2nd Ave & NW 41st St

Sam Durant, conceptual artist-activist, with work in collections of major museums worldwide,  represented by  Paula Cooper Gallery. Born in 1961 in Seattle, Sam Durant is an interdisciplinary artist whose works engage a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. Often taking up forgotten events from the past, his work makes connections between contemporary conflicts and historic legacies. 

Durant’s key works about monuments and memorials include: Proposal for Monument at Altamont Raceway, Tracy, CA (1999),  Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions (2005),  and more recently, Proposal for Public Fountain (2015), a marble work depicting an anarchist statue being blasted by a police water canon.   Recent major public art projects include Labyrinth (2015) in Philadelphia, addressing mass incarceration; and The Meeting House (2016) in Concord, MA, focusing on the subject of race in colonial and contemporary New England.

Featured in international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, Yokohama Triennial and Documenta, Durant’s work is in the collections of many major museums world-wide. 

Connect with Sam Durant on Instagram @studiosamdurant.

Locations: W Flagler St & NW 2nd Ave / NW 2nd Ave & Flagler St / N Miami Ave & NE 20th St / NW 27th St & NW 21st St / NW 7th Ave & NW 7th Ave Cir

Shepard Fairey, The world-renowned graphic artist Frank “Shepard Fairey” was born in 1970 in Charleston, South Carolina. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island in 1992.

Most famously known for his bold, direct designs–such as his portrait of 2008 candidate Barack Obama with the message “Hope”-- Fairey’s work has been used in stencils, stickers, broadsides, sculptures, posters, paintings, and murals. He has consistently devoted his art to political causes and social issues. His work is included in the collections at The Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Connect with Shepard Fairey on Instagram @obeygiant.

Locations: NW 27th Ave & NW 27th St / NW 20th St & NW 17th Ave

Born in 1974, Houston-based artist Trenton Doyle Hancock has produced decades-worth of fantasy and commentary,  incorporating iconography from art history, comics and superheroes, pulp fiction, and myriad pop culture references, resulting in a complex amalgamation of characters and plots possessing universal concepts of light and dark, good and evil, and all the grey in between.

In 2019, a major exhibition of his work, Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass, opened at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA. In 2014, his retrospective, Skin & Bones: 20 Years of Drawing, at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston traveled to Akron Art Museum, OH; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, VA.  Hancock is represented by James Cohan Gallery in NY.

His work is in the collections of museums worldwide including  the Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Menil Collection; Detroit Institute of Art;  Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen; and il Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea, Trento, Italy.

Connect with Trenton Doyle Hancock on Instagram @trenton_doyle_hancock.

Locations: NW 2nd Ave & Flagler St / NW 2nd Ave & NW 4th St / NW 2nd Ave & NW 54th St / SW 1st Ave & W Flagler St

Guerrilla Girls, aka ‘conscience of the art world’, an anonymous group of activists who have achieved world fame for blending statistics with humor.  Since their founding in 1985, they have established a record of hundreds of projects–street posters, banners, actions, books, and videos–found worldwide.   

Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly–a new book–is a complete archive of their history from 1985 to 2020, and was named one of the best art books of 2020 by The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.  Recently their work has been seen at Tate Modern and Whitechapel Gallery, London; São Paulo Museum of Art; the Venice Biennale; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Military History, Dresden; Art Basel Hong Kong; and many other places. 

The Guerrilla Girls’ motto: Do one thing. If it works, do another. If it doesn’t, do another anyway. Keep chipping away.

Connect with Guerrilla Girls on Instagram @guerrillagirls.

Curators

Barbara Pollack, Co-Founder and Co-Director of Art At A Time Like This Inc., is a leading authority on global art movements. Since 1994,  she has written extensively on art from non-western centers for such publications as The New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, Artnews, Art in America, Airmail and many others. She is the author of two books on Chinese contemporary art: Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise (I.B. Tauris, 2018) and The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures in China (Timezone 8, 2010.)

Pollack was the lead curator of the groundbreaking My Generation: Young Chinese Artists, the first exhibition of the 1980s generation of Chinese artists in the U.S.  which was shown at the Tampa Museum of Art and Museum Fine Arts, St. Petersburg in 2014 and traveled to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and the Orange County Museum of Art in 2015. Other recent shows in the U.S. includes WeChat:  A Dialogue in Chinese Art at Asia Society Houston and Lu Yang: Delusional Mandela at MOCA Cleveland.  She has also curated in China most notably Tu Hongtao: A Timely Journey, at the Long Museum West Bund in November 2018 and Sun Xun:  Prediction Laboratory at Yuz Museum, also in Shanghai in 2016.  In 2022, she will present Mirror Image:  Changing Chinese Identity at the Asia Society Museum in New York

Due to her extensive expertise, Pollack has lectured frequently, including participating as a featured speaker at the World Economic Forum’s Summer Davos in China in 2012 and 2013. In 2015, she spoke at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum and at Christie’s headquarters in New York. She has also presented talks at Asia Society, Seattle Asian Art Museum, Sotheby’s Institute, Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, NYU Museum Studies Program, NYU Shanghai, Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Art Basel Miami Beach, College Art Association, Louis Museum of Contemporary Art, Berkeley Art Museum, Milwaukee Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Toronto Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum She. is quoted regularly as an expert including a radio interview on PBS-WNYC.

You can connect with Barbara on Instagram at @BXPollack.

Anne Verhallen is the founder of Art At A Time Like This, an online base non-profit organization supporting artists and curators in the 21st century. ATLT focuses on presenting artwork in response to current events in public space, online, and IRL.

Verhallen is also an agent for visual artists and is currently the director of partnership at 291 Agency. She has worked on projects for many leading artists, including Nancy Baker Cahill, DRIFT, Hank Willis Thomas, Derrick Adams, and Lily Kwong. In this capacity, Verhallen has overseen large-scale activations and installations in collaboration with brands in the luxury industry such as Louis Vuitton, Valentino, Google, and BMW. Prior to 291 Agency, Verhallen was the director of the fine art division at CXA for 4 years.

You can connect with Anne on Instagram at @Anne_Verhallen.

 Participating Organizations

Art at a Time Like This is a 501c3 not-for-profit arts organization that serves artists and curators facing adversity at times of crisis. Utilizing public platforms (digital and IRL) , this organization presents art in a non-profit context, highlighting art as an invaluable conveyor of content, rather than commodity. Our mission is to show that art can make a difference and that artists and curators can be thought-leaders, envisioning alternative futures for humanity.

Art at a Time Like This was founded on March 17, 2020 by independent curators Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen who saw the need for a new kind of alternative space to address the pandemic and other crises, ever addressing the question, “How can we think about art at a time like this?”

Connect with Art at a Time Like This on Instagram at @artatatimelikethis.

Founded in 2015, SaveArtSpace is a non-profit organization that works to create an urban gallery experience, launching exhibitions that address intersectional themes and foster a progressive message of social change. By placing culture over commercialism, SaveArtSpace aims to empower artists from all walks of life and inspire a new generation of young creatives and activists.