Save the date for a series of events surrounding Let’s Get Free 7th art show and fundraiser. We’re planning art demos, gallery tours, and a panel discussion with international political prisoners.
The show will be on display at the Irma Freeman Center for Imagination, in the Garfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh.
The deadline is coming up to submit your art and poems! Let’s Get Free’s 7th Art Show is a fundraiser, a contest for artists and poets in prison, and a month-long occasion for creative communal gatherings and artistic celebration. Get excited!
This year’s theme:
This Is Me
How can art help you express the complex parts of yourself, your world, and your experience? How does our unjust carceral system impact you? How can justice transform the way we see ourselves and others?
The show will open in November of 2024 at the Irma Freeman Center for Imagination, in the Garfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh.
Call for visual art and poems from artists on both sides of the prison walls
This year’s theme:
This Is Me
How can art help you express the complex parts of yourself, your world, and your experience? How does our unjust carceral system impact you? How can justice transform the way we see ourselves and others?
Let’s Get Free invites artists and poets to create work that represents you. This year’s theme was suggested by Sheená King, who is on our prison advisory board. Our committee chose this theme because knowing each other, and letting ourselves be known, is part of how we build and strengthen our movements.
The theme is expansive; it can be interpreted many different ways. Whether you choose a realistic, surreal, abstract, or other approach, this year’s art show focuses on space for sharing ourselves with each other. “Let’s Get Free” is a call to all of us, to get free together. Because no one is free until all of us are free.
Let’s Get Free’s 7th Art Show is a fundraiser. By submitting art or poems to the show you are consenting for your art to be auctioned and sold to raise money to support Let’s Get Free. By submitting artwork and poems you are consenting to allow us to post and use your artwork to raise awareness on different platforms. We will credit you and share any posts we make with you! Any art that is not auctioned will be saved and sold in our “cash and carry” store the following year.
This is a contest. This year we are hosting a contest solely for artists and poets in prison. We consider all art from people outside of prison an offering of solidarity in support of the movement to end mass incarceration.
The show will open in November of 2024 at the Irma Freeman Center for Imagination, in the Garfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh.
Today is a day to celebrate interdependence and embrace the truth that no one truly does anything alone. Welcome to the beginning of our new Guaranteed Basic Income initiative – a Softer Landing Fund.
A Softer Landing Fund is a guaranteed income initiative that will distribute recurring cash payments with no strings attached to 10 formerly incarcerated people who are connected with Let’s Get Free. This pilot initiative will last one year and prioritize women returning from long sentences. The initial cohort will be invited to participate by Let’s Get Free’s board and volunteers.
This project was inspired by the Community Love Fund in Massachusetts led by The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls and Families for Justice as Healing. We unite with their motivation, “The program is intentionally designed to challenge the racial and economic injustice plaguing families affected by the criminal legal system.”
We named our project A Softer Landing because even if you have a lot of support coming home from prison it is still very hard. There is the idea that often when you leave prison you enter into “financial incarceration”. You have to pay to be on parole, pay for unnecessary urine tests, face employment and housing barriers from felony status, you may be ordered to pay court and restitution fees and experience exclusion from social welfare programs, and more.
On top of financial obstacles and fees there is the unquantifiable cost of what prison does and the cost of living your life under surveillance. For example, having to get permission to leave the county, having to relive your crime every time you apply for a job or try to rent an apartment. This creates a lot of stress which impacts the health of the body and the mind.
Organizers hope to raise $50,000 for this inaugural fund, distributing a total of $4,320 to 10 people over 1 year in monthly payments of $365.
It costs people in Pennsylvania roughly $30 a month to be on parole – that’s $1 a day for the general supervision charge. We are using this number symbolically as the amount participants will receive and will give an extra $365 on top of the year to spite the accrued annual fee!
Graphic adapted from original artwork by Tomie Arai made in collaboration with The People’s Paper Co-op as part of their annual Free Our Mothers Campaign
Artists were asked to create work around the ideas of home and relationships to create a show that encapsulates the feeling of home: What does home look like? Feel like? A space? A state of mind?
The call was to create things that literally glowed. People were encouraged to create work with ships and pun off concepts like relationSHIP, friendSHIP, leaderSHIP, etc.
Glow Home is an homage to friends old and new recently released from prison and a prayer that our loved ones still behind bars will be home soon. There will be an altar where you can leave something for a loved one who you wish to come home.
Over 60 artists from both sides of the prison walls have submitted provocative pieces utilizing ceramics, photography, textiles, beadwork, silk screen, collage, stained glass, digital drawing, water colors etc. There are close to 100 pieces of art up for auction benefiting the work of this local prison advocacy group. The opening and auction will take place on October 4th from 6 – 10pm with the auction closing at 9pm. The show will stay up through October 26th.
Gallery Hours for Glow Home October 4th – 26th
Gallery Hours are every Thursday thru Saturday 1- 7pm and Sundays 1-4pm
Gallery Hours are suspended during events. Check Boom’s Calendar
Liberate our Imaginations: A Vital Step Towards a World Without Prisons
October 12th – 12 – 3pm – Saturday
A 3 hour participatory workshop With Kempis Ghani Songster & etta cetera
Back by popular demand, Ghani Songster returns from Philly to lead an interactive space in effort to free ourselves from the mental chains that inhibit our progress. Ghani believes that our salvation hinges on our ability to liberate our imagination. etta says, “It’s gonna be like going to the gym for your mind.” How do we stay connected to the bigger movement of abolition?
Listen to Ghani shares 5 Lessons of the Geese from last years workshop.
The event is free but please rsvp letsgetfreepa@gmail.com
Snacks will be provided
Lifting Up Women in Prison
Words and Songs by Naomi Blount, (Pending Travel Permission but we are speaking it into existence!) Followed by a Panel Discussion: Impact of DA’s Office on Incarcerated Women with Lisa Middleman and local community leaders.
October 19th – 12pm – 3pm Saturday @ Boom Concepts – 5139 Penn Ave
Free Lunch served at 1 pm
Naomi Blount, 69, is the second Pennsylvania woman to receive commutation in nearly three decades after serving 35 years of a life sentence. Released this past July, Naomi will share reflections of her experiences from prison to the commutation process as well as lift up the women she left behind. Community leaders and Lisa Middleman, candidate for District Attorney, will then convene for a panel to speak on the impact that the DA’s office has on people impacted by the criminal injustice system. The event will conclude with a musical performance by Naomi.
The event is free but please rsvp letsgetfreepa@gmail.com
Sign Up to be a sustaining donor during the month of October to help us reach our goal of 50 new monthly sustainers! You will receive a special Thank You Gift of your choosing including limited edition artwork or a bouncing baby house plant (Pittsburgh only:)
Monthly sustainers are a critical part of community organizing and help us gather unrestricted funds. This money is used for: direct assistance to people in prison and returning citizens (hard to write a grant for that) stamps, printing newsletters and commutation kits, speaker stypens as well as transportation costs to visit prisons, the state capitol and faraway meetings and conferences.
Our goal is to sign up:
20 Sustainers @ $5 a month
15 Sustainers @ $10 a month
10 Sustainers @ $15 a month
5 Sustainers @ $20 a month
5 Sustainers @ $25 a month
If achieved would raise collectively $575 a Month. Simply click the donate button and check the “recurring donation box”
Coalition to Abolish Death by Incarceration(CABDI)
Day of Action to End DBI & Heal Communities
October 23rd – 7am – 7pm Wednesday in Harrisburg
Sign up for Vans from Pittsburgh by filling out this form
Join us for a free screening of Prison in 12 Landscapes on Wednesday April 18 at 6pm at the Melwood Screening Room – 477 Melwood Ave.
Following the film showing, there will be a Q&A with the film’s director, who will be joined by members of Let’s Get Free and Coalition to Abolish Death by Incarceration.
Immediately after the film showing and across the street, there will be a dance party where the fundraising for Let’s Get Free will continue. Join us for one or both events! Food and drinks will be available for sale at the dance party benefit.
We are very excited to be participating in a criminal justice system focused Candidate Forum in advance of the PA state legislature primary on May 15. Please join us, especially if you live in one of the four districts that will be represented, to ensure that the critical issues facing our communities are acknowledged and addressed by our legislative representatives-to-be!
