Maria Gaspar

MARIA GASPAR

Title: Disappearance Jail
Original Medium: Laser Print
Year: 2021

Edition of 250
Unsigned
Embossed & hand-numbered
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemuhle 210gsm 50% rag watercolor paper
13 x 19"

About the Print: For over a decade, Maria Gaspar has developed and produced long-term community-based public projects with people who have been system-impacted in Chicago and beyond. This work stands as a reflection of her childhood experience growing up a few blocks away from the largest single-site jail in the country, Cook County Jail and acts as a visual representation of an abolitionist future.
From the curator of this print, Pedro Alonzo: " Questioning if perhaps it is necessary to destroy symbols of the past in order to move forward. Maria Gaspar has dedicated much of her career to deconstructing the quagmire of mass incarceration through community-based projects surrounding the Cook County Jail in Chicago. Gaspar uses simple holes on the image of the building to dematerialize the jail in a defiant act of visualizing a desired future"

Artist Bio: Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist whose work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance, Gaspar's practice situates itself within historically marginalized sites and spans multiple formats, scales, and durations to produce liberatory actions. Gaspar's projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Maria has received the United States Artists Fellowship, the Frieze Impact Prize, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including MoMA PS1, New York, NY; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.

Website: www.mariagaspar.com
Instagram: @maria__gaspar