Texas After Violence Project is proud of our artists and writer-in-residence. Each year, we invite artists and writers whose work centers on the impacts of state-sanctioned violence to build alongside our archives of memory and healing, and to interact with transformative and restorative justice. During the residency, we hope to carve out a space for artists and writers to imagine and create dynamic pieces that deal with the textured nuance of the carceral state and what narrative power can look like, can change, and can mean. This creative work can animate the realities of mass incarceration, the impacts of state-sanctioned violence, and the need for narrative power — and can expand upon the interviews and materials in our archives.
Our current artist-in-residence is Tiffany Ike, and our previous artist-in-residence was Hollis Hammond and Mark Menjívar. Our current writer-in-residence is James D. Jones, with previous writers-in-residence being Jorge Antonio Renaud, Faylita Hicks, and Juania Sueños.
Tiffany Ike is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and scholar from Houston, TX. She utilizes different mediums including spoken word poetry, theater, visual art, and filmmaking, to discuss ideas of faith, history, and liberation in all its forms. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin – Madison’s First Wave Program, Tiffany studied hip hop through a “performance as activism” lens. She has had her visual work showcased in spaces such as the African American Museum in Philadelphia and performed spoken word poetry on stages like Tedx Houston. She received her MFA in Writing & Producing for Television at Loyola Marymount University, where she studied the evolution of Black TV and examined television as a historical record. Tiffany is now currently a lecturer at her alma mater. She believes in intersecting her academic and artistic interests with teaching and community organizing in any city she finds herself living in, collects fancy socks, and every once in a while relives her hoop dreams in the gym.
James D. James is an incarcerated organizer, writer, and artist from Decatur, Illinois. Over the past few years, he’s had the privilege of engaging affirming, healing work with organizers from across the country who are similarly committed to shedding light on and sharing light within the carceral system and the communities it impacts. Together they built the Prison Solidarity Project, an inside/outside writers network that has grown to include over 1000 participants.This network has spawned book clubs, art shows, participatory defense committees, mutual aid infrastructure, reentry support teams, and ever-strengthening solidarity. In 2022 James was selected with his comrade Caren Holmes for the Mavel Cooke Fellow for Abolitionist Journalism by Shadowproof Press. That same year they produced an exhibition, titled “Visitation,” featuring the art and creativity of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated abolitionists at the All Street Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side. Follow @free.rocko to see more of their work.
2022
Unamerican Dreams: Immigrant Stories Interrupted by the State
A 2022 Visions After Violence Community Fellow and 2023 Writer in Residence, Sueños centers her work on honoring the dreams of loved ones who have suffered because of state-created borders. Sueños herself was undocumented for most of her life until recently. Her firsthand experience and the loss of family members to deportation activated her and her work to contribute to abolitionist and activist efforts.
2022 & 2023
Mark Menjívar (he/him) is a San Antonio based artist and Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University. His art practice primarily consists of creating participatory projects while being rooted in photography, oral history, archives, and social action.
DLP: Mirror (Mark Menjívar)
Through a multi-channel sound and architectural installation, the artist explores the story of David Lee Powell and the musical score he composed while incarcerated on death row.
Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, PA
2021
How to Read a Vessel: DLP
Images from the “DLP” installation, part of Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System at CAMH. “DLP” represents the full contents of David Lee Powell’s cell at the time of his execution in 2010, after spending 32-years on death row.
2020
2019
2018
Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System
2022
2021
– Blue Mountain Review—2 Poems
– Black Femme Collective—Don’t Waste Your Time
– Gumbo Media—A Century of Disg(race)
– Brave New Films—Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem
– ITVS/PBS—45 Days in a Texas Jail
– The Young Turks—The Conversation w/ Robert Greenwald and Faylita Hicks
2021
Awake in the Dark is a multimedia exhibition resulting from a collaboration between visual artist Hollis Hammonds and poet Sasha West. The pieces begin what Timothy Morton calls “grief work,” articulating the experience of living in the midst of a fragile, changing ecosystem. Through self-interrogations, the artists question both individual and societal contributions to environmental crisis. Viewers dwell in wreckage, suspended between flood and fire, stasis and loss. Objects lose their meaning as markers for a normal existence. In these works, the distinction between natural and human-made disasters starts to collapse. Hammonds and West invite viewers to see anew their own part in making the physical world and, thus, the future.
Awake in the Dark was on view at the Austin Public Library Gallery, Nov. 1 – Dec. 2, 2021. Reception: November 6, 2021, 2 – 4 PM.
“Awake in dark: How Hollis Hammonds and Sasha West ask us about our role in the environmental crisis,” Sightlines Magazine, by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin, November 21, 2021.
Send in the Needles
I have no grand words for you,
nothing noble from the rough coast of exile.
Just our coughs, low and discreet,
and the squeaks as the gurneys glide past,
piled high with the properly dead.
What eloquence did you seek?
What gospel of mine
could ring its melancholy bell
enough to bring you jangling by,
belts sagging with your weight,
chrome keys held just so,
to soothe my buzz and whine?
Look. The rain quit cooling long ago
and yet you peel away your silk and
dance for clouds.
Hand in hand you whirl, in step,
as if you still wore flowers in your hair.
As if your chants still mattered.
As if they ever did.
The scent of powder;
fire & fuse.
The fall of hammer;
bang & boom.
The clink of mortar;
more & more.
It’s all you’ve ever known.
We live in dreams
and slip through nights,
our blood exultant.
We leave our flesh upon the wire,
the scabs still weeping when we wake.
We are mad, in legions,
insects in our skulls.
What do you do?
Slice squares through iron;
enough to push their pills on through;
enough to peer at what lies huddled here.
We dull, ten times ten times ten
again and again times two
and still
they see no need to feed our eyes.
We are speechless.
Ranks upon ranks.
Our tongues are broken.
We cannot speak of pain; it fills the world
and yet, you dance.
Muteness has a fine appeal.
Tear out each other’s throat;
you’ll see it makes for strangled cries.
Send in the needles.
There are worse ways to die.
© 2023 | Texas After Violence Project
