A Stamp Costs 5 Hours: A Panel on Incarcerated Creative/Cultural Labor

Archive-Based Creative Arts, Empowerment Avenue and W.A.G.E. are proud to present A Stamp Costs 5 Hours: A Panel Discussion on Compensation & Incarcerated Creative/Cultural Labor.

In this panel, we will present data we have collected about creative and cultural labor by incarcerated people around the country. W.A.G.E. and the Freelance Solidarity Project will share their efforts around wage transparency and improving the conditions of creative workers, and discuss how these organizing tactics can carry across Pr*son walls. We will also be joined by Willie Kearse, formerly incarcerated author and advocate, who will speak about ongoing conditions and concerns within correctional facilities in New York State and incarcerated journalist Sara Kielly, who will join us by phone to speak on her experiences navigating the industry from inside.

We hope to create a space not just to center the creative and cultural labor by incarcerated people, but to better understand what goes into that labor, the risks involved, and the importance of fair and transparent compensation.

The event will be held within the gallery show "The Sky’s Fury Mirrors Mine: Art & the Archive of Indeterminate Release," an exhibition of works by members of the Archive-Based Creative Arts Collective, organized by Willie Kearse and Tyler Morse of the Parole Preparation Project.

Through intuitive drawing, archival mixed media, visual expression and poetry, the artists of The Sky’s Fury Mirrors Mine confront the legacy of a system fundamentally at odds with freedom, responsible for delivering people into it. Refusing the given notion that their stories are meant to be told by another, these artists engage personal and carceral archives to grapple with themes of transformation, violence, motherhood, aging, love, transition and time’s passage, on their own terms. Collectively, the works produce a new history of the carceral present, as told through an array of singular visual and poetic voices.

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IMAGE DETAILS: Change is Possible, Remy Trail, ballpoint pen on purple cardstock with deposition form in a modified police file, 2023.

Host or Publisher Empowerment Avenue