Did you know that the Michener Art Museum was once the Bucks County Jail? A multi-year initiative, Behind These Walls: Reckoning with Incarceration acknowledges and explores the history of the Michener Art Museum site through new interpretation of the museum’s building and gardens. This initiative is developed with a Community Advisory Committee and includes participatory art installations by multidisciplinary artist jackie sumell.
For the past few months, the Michener has been working with a Community Advisory Committee, which includes formerly incarcerated individuals, artists, mental health advocates, museum professionals, educators, and community residents, to explore the narratives and artifacts that underlie stories of displacement, enslavement, and most notably, confinement and incarceration tied to the museum’s site. Behind These Walls: Community Perspectives on our History outlines the process, research, and perspectives that informed this ongoing discussion. Visitors have an opportunity to engage with, and contribute to, this conversation as we look behind—and beyond—the museum’s walls, bearing witness to the evolution of a place that reflects changing societal values and aspirations. Within the exhibition, jackie sumell invites us to consider the meaning of justice through plants and the distribution of seeds for visitors to take home, representing the literal and metaphorical growth of these ideas.
About jackie sumell:
jackie sumell is a multidisciplinary artist and activist based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work explores the intersection of social sculpture, mindfulness practices, humanness, and radical gardening. She has spent the last two decades working directly with incarcerated folks, most notably Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King, who spent decades in solitary confinement at Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison. sumell’s work, including her Solitary Gardens and Abolitionist’s Apothecary, goes beyond traditional art boundaries, challenging viewers to confront the realities of the prison industrial complex while envisioning a future without incarceration. sumell has exhibited extensively throughout the world and has been the recipient of multiple residencies and fellowships including, but not limited to, A Blade of Grass Fellowship, a Robert Rauschenberg Artist-as-Activist Fellowship, a Soros Justice Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Behind These Walls: Reckoning with Incarceration has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
