Featuring visual artworks by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists, this virtual gallery, To Breathe, is part of White Snake Project’s Death By Life series on “Understanding and Responding to Mass Incarceration” in collaboration with the Pozen Center Human Rights Lab.
The title of our virtual exhibition, To Breathe, was inspired by Renaldo Hudson’s artist statement for his painting “Freedom Cost,” which he created when he was on death row and serves as a banner for Death by Life.
“I was sitting in the cell watching the news, listening to people going off about crime. And why they should throw the keys away on all of us. I heard these words, ‘FREEDOM COST.’ I remember listening as the officers came down the gallery to take one of the brothers to execute him. The words were screaming in my head. ‘FREEDOM COST! And don’t you forget it.’ [The man I painted] is trying to breathe…” – Renaldo Hudson
The visual works featured in To Breathe were designed by artists with wide-ranging life experiences as well as the shared experience of incarceration; and their artworks illustrate the breadth, depth, and power of imagination as a practice of freedom.