EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

DATE: Ongoing (exhibit), 4 p.m. (lecture) March 20, 2013

EVENT: “Interrupted Life: Incarcerated Mothers in the United States,” a traveling art exhibit, opens with a public lecture by historian and curator Rickie Solinger. The talk, “The New Sterilization: Incarceration as Population Policy in the United States,” and exhibit are free to the public.

PLACE: U-M’s Lane Hall Gallery (exhibit) and Room 2239 (lecture), 204 S. State St., Ann Arbor

DETAILS: “Interrupted Life” provides a dramatic introduction to the ever-growing numbers of women who are incarcerated in the U.S. today. Many are mothers, separated from their children.

The number of women in prison has grown by more than 800 percent over the last three decades, according to the Institute on Women and Criminal Justice. Currently, 200,000 women are behind bars, and more than 1 million are on probation. Two-thirds are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses; many of these are drug-related crimes.

In addition, the exhibit documents the disproportionate number of African-Americans incarcerated in the United States today. African-American women are three times more likely and Hispanic women are 69 percent more likely than white women to be in prison.

“Indeed, this system is about race,” Solinger said.

The exhibit features five mixed-media installations:

• “Centerpiece,” made from thousands of “art-cards,” solicited from incarcerated women in 38 institutions around the country. The women responded to the prompt, “From where I sit, this is what being a mother means to me…”
• “Warrior Cards,” which records acts of resistance to the prison-industrial complex; factual information presented in comic-book style.
• “Photovoice” projects by women who have returned to their communities after serving time.
• “Stretched Thin,” an example of the extreme efforts by a mother and daughter to communicate with each other across many miles.
• “The Rules,” which, according to Solinger, is “the coldest, hardest, most elegant piece in the exhibition—represents the rules governing the visits of children to their incarcerated parents. The rules are hard to read and impossible to avoid. They are, in totality, incomprehensible, often contradictory and illogical.”

Funded by the Ford Foundation, “Interrupted Life” first opened in 2006 at the California Institution for Women in Chino. Since then it has traveled to college campuses and elsewhere across the country.

SPONSORS: U-M Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Department of Women’s Studies, with additional support from Afroamerican and African Studies, American Culture, Center for the Education of Women, English Language and Literature, Ford School of Public Policy, History, History of Art, Institute for the Humanities, Rackham Graduate School, School of Social Work and the Understanding Race Theme Semester.