Installation view of Kimball Art Center’s “Gaze Into These Eyes,” with works by LWD (left) and Frank Blazquez.

The era of mass incarceration went vogue in the 1970s, when the perceived uptick in crime had the American public and politicians shaking in their britches. Racially-coded theories like the broken windows theory and mandatory minimums disproportionately caught Black people and other people of color in the carceral claw. Pieces of legislation out of the Johnson and Nixon eras went far in appeasing the post-apartheid white public in cities across America, fueling their white flight to the suburbs, gutting urban hubs of tax revenue to support social services and leaving behind the Black, immigrant and Latinx communities in the increasingly dire conditions of the inner city. All of these policies have had crippling, disproportionate effects on communities of color, effects still felt today.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have quantified the disparity: Black men make up only 6 percent of the US adult population, yet are about 35 percent of the prison population, incarcerated at a rate six times that of white men. The Vera Institute, an organization in New York City working to end mass incarceration, notes that, “By the turn of the 21st century, Black men born in the 1960s were more likely to have gone to prison than to have completed college or military service.” One in three Black men will have gone to prison at some point in their lives. All of this has a devastating effect on women, children and communities, leaving gaping holes from those those who got whisked away into a penal system that is actually the culprit of ravaging the safety and security of our nation’s communities.

Now showing at the Kimball Art Center in Park City, in partnership with The Center for Art and Advocacy, Gaze Into These Eyes is a group show of 16 artists who have been impacted by the carceral system. Centering portraiture, the show brings representation back to those who have been disappeared, forgotten behind prison walls, and brings dignity and humanity back to those stripped of their voice.

Detail of Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez’s “Childhood Heroes.”

In tasteful event programming, Kimball Art Center hosted a two-artist interview and open dialogue with Omari Booker and LWD, two of the exhibiting artists. Instead of having a room of Utah’s wealthiest echelon listening to a heart-racing nervous white lady asking parachuted in questions, the two artists interviewed each other in front of their respective works. Coming from common backgrounds as formerly incarcerated Black men, yet shaped from their experiences in different parts of the country, they provided the audience access to the core of their work with ease and depth.

Omari spoke with L.W.D. about his series “Police Station Portraits (aka Mugshots)” (2024-2025). Compton-born and raised, LWD’s work is rooted in his city. The street ball and car culture. The vibrancy of mid-century LA. Also, in his experience while incarcerated. Forthcoming and honest, L.W.D. admits to the audience, he did it. He isn’t going to make excuses, he sold the drugs that sent him to prison. LWD says that in prison when you volunteered to stand in a lineup—which he did often—you got more food. “Police Station Portraits” is a three-by-four grid lineup of ambiguous faces, skin tones in blues and mauves, with noses spanning neon red and sky blue, lips accentuating a monochrome palette or complementing it, each figure donning a pair of sunglasses and wearing white. Each canvas in the grid has a corresponding toy car hanging below, separating each portrait row. From VW bugs to low riders, trucks and a vintage camaro, the cars speak to youthful dreams and the transition into adulthood that L.W.D. experienced from inside a prison cell—he came out a generation later and witnessed a whole new reality than when he went in. The cars further speak to how so many instances of incarceration begin with the car. A simple traffic stop can turn violent, unfounded suspicions rooted in prejudice against someone of a certain skin tone can end with a young boy dead or funneled into the cyclical penal system, snuffing their chance at a better life. That’s how the LA Riots of 1992 broke out, after all. L.W.D. holds the ambiguity of the figures for the viewers to be able to see that those people can be anyone: our neighbor, our friend, our loved one.

Detail of L.W.D.’s “Police Station Portraits (aka Mugshots).”

Three works by Omari Booker.

The talk transitioned into the adjacent gallery, where Omari Booker spoke on his series of three pieces—“Be,” “Disciples Village” and “Greater View”— a portrait of a man Booker refers to as B, as well as two portraits of a neighborhood as seen through the eyes of B. The valiant portrait plays with the subject’s seemingly eternal ability to just be. Booker said of his friend that he is not homeless; rather, he lives outside, in his neighborhood, as a lifestyle choice. He is perhaps neurodivergent, and after the passing of his aunt ten years ago, B has been sitting at the stoop of the decrepit neighborhood church. Watching, observant, nimble. Because of B’s striking looks and constant presence as neighbor, Booker took to cultivating a relationship with him. They would talk for hours, taking it beyond the canvas and making it personal. Booker talked about how centering this man who gets forgotten on the curb because of his nonconformist approach to living in society can humanize and celebrate our unhoused neighbors. Formerly incarcerated, Booker approaches his subject with the empathy and patience, the understanding with radical acceptance that a mentor and family-friend graced him with after his incarceration, giving Booker another chance when he got out. Booker reminded us gawkers of such a cold and minimalist life that B is actually free of so many of the stresses we society dwellers must deal with. He reframes our perspective, asking us to understand it as a simpler way of life rather than a deficient one

Booker’s two portraits of the neighborhood scan B’s view from the church stoop. “Disciples Village” sees the greater Nashville area in the distance, the Batman tower recognizable to any Nashvillian, with an architectural tone to how Booker blueprints the structures in a color-blocked palette of gentle yellows and periwinkle. “Greater View” features B’s late aunt’s house, which he watches over with the omnipresence of a street cat. The two portraits capture the pre-gentrification of the area, the quiet of the neighborhood, through the eyes of someone watching the nuances of the area change across time.

Booker and L.W.D.’s works are surrounded by an assortment of other mediums by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists and people working towards prison abolition, bringing faces to those disappeared by a system absorbing the lives of far too many in this country.

Works by Gary Tyler, from left, “Bertha” and “Trinidad.”

Of particular note to fellow fiber arts enthusiasts, Gary Tyler’s quilts use fiber-as-storytelling. Tyler was incarcerated in the former plantation-turned-prison Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, the country’s largest maximum-security prison. He was wrongfully convicted of a murder when he was 17 years old, snuffing out 42 years from his young life. He was the youngest person on death row in the country, eventually getting out in 2016, when he was 57 years old, after his art practice garnered him some attention from the outside. In resistance to letting the unfortunate circumstances dictate the quality of his life, Tyler invested himself in the theatre program at the prison, eventually becoming president. He taught himself how to sew to support those in the country’s first prison hospice program, started in 1988 at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The resulting products hang at the Kimball—portraits of inmates who participated in the theatre program, with motifs of the slave-era conditions in the background. The quilts use fiber arts to humanize those caught in the system, commenting on the threads of our colonial past still running rampant today through the carceral system..

Making up the rest of Gaze Into These Eyes, charcoal self-portraits, oil paintings of young mentees, photograph portraits from Southwestern reservation towns, music videos depicting the story of incarcerated pregnant women and access to birthcare, sculptures of melting paletas, intricate oil surrealism sagas, force viewers to gaze into the eyes of those this country hopes to disappear, to bring accountability to this failing penal system. Shows like this are a part of a growing movement of prison art painting a broader portrait of the marginalized and incarcerated experience in America, and the power art has in healing, rehabilitation, processing trauma through modes of connection and creativity.

Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez’s series of Melted Paletas, 2024.

Gaze Into These Eyes, Kimball Art Center, Park City, through January 4.

All images by Shawn Rossiter.

Genevieve Vahl

Genevieve Vahl is a writer, farmer and artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her writing focuses on how art and community intersect, how to bring access to food and covering climate solutions around the Salt Lake Valley. She also writes poetry, binds artist books, makes paper and runs cyanotype prints from film.