Considering Justice Through Art at the Parrish Art Museum

The comprehensive show—organized by Corinne Erni, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs & Senior Curator, with support from Brianna Hernández, Curatorial Fellow, and co-curated by Hank Willis Thomas and Carly Fischer—is an invitation to the public to reassess the meaning of justice today, in a complex time of turbulence and inequality. For the show, artists—including Zoë Buckman, Pamela Council, Jeremy Dennis, Jeffrey Gibson, Eric Gottesman, Christine Sun Kim, Muna Malik, Joiri Minaya, Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneria, Kambui Olujimi, Hank Willis Thomas, and Marie Watt— worked with For Freedoms to inspire the audience’s participation in art and collaboration in cultural strategy. 

As part of For Freedoms's larger initiative, “Another Justice: By Any Medium Necessary,” the exhibition is made up of 30 multifaceted artworks and series of photography, mixed media, wall painting, sculpture, and site-specific installations. Indigenous artists Watt (Seneca), Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw-Cherokee), Miranda-Rivadeneira (Ecuadorian, Chi’xi), and Dennis (Shinnecock) created works especially for the nearby Shinnecock Monuments. The electronic billboards, reaching 62 feet in height, were constructed in 2019 by the Shinnecock Indian Nation. 

Gibson’s digital collage, The Spirits are Laughing, is a compelling holographic and prismatic artwork. Dennis’s Return Our Stolen Sacred Shinnecock Hills presents a photograph of precious, rural land. Rivadeneria’s Have You Forgotten How Magical You Are? fuses photography with Indigenous iconography. The digital artworks energize the Land Back Movement and encourage audiences to examine their relationship to the land, to history, and to fellow human beings. 

Each artist in the presentation explores their own interpretation of and perspective on justice with diverse materials, techniques, and poetics. Council’s sculpture Relief 24, in monochromatic beige hues, is made up of silicone tiles based on sneaker outsoles sampled from the archives of Reebok’s factory texture library. The work is tied to her family’s history of working in the potato fields. Gottesman’s photograph, Alia Consuming A Photograph Of Me Playing Indian, presents a child biting into a photograph of another child in an Indigenous costume. 

Malik presents a journey to justice by way of a mirrored acrylic, steel, and LED-lit sculpture entitled Blessing of the Boats. Olujimi’s Redshift ink drawings depict presidential assassinations in stark black and white. Thomas’s Remember Me, an installation in white neon, pays homage to those left behind or forgotten. Away from Prying Eyes and Shedding, prints created by Minaya, collage the black female body with camouflage and vibrant landscape imagery. In Buckman’s clutch my belly, hand embroidery and ink on vintage textiles elicits black joy and female empowerment. 

In collaboration with the museum, the nearby Watermill Center has created a For Freedoms artist residency planned for this fall as part of the center’s Inga Maren Otto Fellowship. During this time, For Freedoms will organize town halls and public programming for the community.