Family & Relationships
Artists often choose to capture relationships through their art. Many use their loved ones as subjects, like their partners, friends, siblings, and children. Others feature relationships through the anthropomorphization of animals, as well as through the liberal use of the abstract. The moments that these artists choose to memorialize are many and varied: Love, disconnection, peace, violence, as well as the everyday interactions that characterize what it means to be with others.
We highlight the extraordinarily varied ways in which this year’s artists have captured the theme of family and relationships. In “El Inmigrante,” Miguel Vidaña captures the intergenerational plight of immigrant families and their ties to land. Artists like Adam Phillips, who are capable of creating greeting cards in prisons, fill a gap in the prison environment, where access to goods that incarcerated people can send to their loved ones are severely limited. In “The Madness of K2 (Toonchi) Use !” the artist ALL PAIN, No Pity! 2024 convincingly captures the tragedy of relationships mediated by drug use and the desire for escape in prisons.
We choose to feature family and relationships in order to demonstrate how it is at the heart of our humanities to want to be connected and seen by others. In thematizing family and relationships, we illuminate the extraordinary number of lives that are impacted by mass incarceration, including the children, siblings, parents, pets, and friends of the incarcerated person. We highlight the breadth of relationships that characterize life on the inside, from caring friendships, remembrances of loved ones that have passed, as well as the forms of connection that conditions of confinement make impossible.
By: Vitalis Im
