Ashley Hunt
Ashley Hunt is an artist, activist, writer, and educator who has dedicated his socially-engaged art practice to documenting the expansion of the U.S. prison system. While tracing the proliferation of prisons across the nation, Hunt also explores how people fail to see the extent of incarceration’s impact. His work looks at the growth, ecologies, effects on communities, abolition, and the continuation of the US carceral system. He produces short and feature-length documentaries, video installations, maps, performances, and photography. In works including Corrections Documentary Project (2001–10), Prison Maps (2002), A World Map in Which We See… (2004–07), Notes on the Emptying of a City (2006–10), and Degrees of Visibility (2010–present), Hunt works in dialogue with movement-building and grassroots organizations, including Critical Resistance, the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Citizens for Quality Education, Southerners on New Ground, and Friends and Family of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children. His works have shown in venues ranging from community centers to prisons to museums, including Pitzer Art Galleries, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Project Row Houses, Houston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; Documenta 12, Germany, and Sinopale Biennial, Turkey. His writings include the book, Notes on the Emptying of a City, and have appeared in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice; X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Key Sites
Commentaries, Interviews, and Lectures
- Ashley Hunt - Making Abolition Irresistable
- [Liveness, performance, and this exact place in time: Ashley Hunt at TEDxCalArts] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9k3hDfAQ0c)
- Art, Abolition, And The University: Ashley Hunt and the Underground Scholars
- [Common Ground | What’s With All the Exhibitions About Prisons?] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN-KyWR1Ye8)
Academic References
- Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. Vol. 21. Univ of California Press, 2007.
- Gilmore, R. W. (2022). Abolition geography: Essays towards liberation. Verso Books.
- Hunt, Ashley. "Double Time Pictures of the Arizona State Prison at Florence." Design and Culture 15.2 (2023): 243-254.
- Hunt, Ashley. "Politics of vision in the carceral state: Legibility and looking in hostile territory." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. 2017.
- Hunt, Ashley. "The disappearing/reappearing prison." Art Journal 66.3 (2007): 68-73.
- Sexton, Jared. "Captivity, By Turns: A Comment on the Work of Ashley Hunt." Art Journal 66.3 (2007): 74-79.
