Angela Davis Brings Her Message of Redefining Justice to Rutgers
Davis visits the university in conjunction with the exhibition Angela Davis—Seize the Time at the Zimmerli Art Museum
Angela Davis asked a packed Rutgers audience to imagine an exhibit at the Zimmerli Art Museum dedicated to her social justice activism without her name and image. What would remain in Angela Davis—Seize the Time, she said, is a powerful story of all that organized communities can achieve.
“No individual regardless of their greatness deserves such recognition – rather, it is about the tendency to misrecognize the work that is done collectively by organized communities of people,” said Davis, who helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” as she spoke Friday at Kirkpatrick Chapel at Rutgers-New Brunswick.
She noted that when she was acquitted of criminal conspiracy charges in 1972 that stemmed from accusations of involvement in a shootout, she told friends that people would forget her name in two to three years, and she would be free to live her life in anonymity.
“Here am I, 50 years later, trying to convey the same message today in connection with an exhibition that’s focused on me but at the same time captures the phenomenal collective activism and art production and visual culture that helped to create a new consciousness regarding future prospects of social justice,” Davis said. “And – to invoke the theme of this campaign – to redefine justice and freedom so that it includes all of us.”
Before her talk, Davis – who asks audiences to imagine a world without prisons – viewed the exhibit that runs through June 15, 2022, before it moves to the Oakland Museum of California.
The exhibition is inspired by an archive in Oakland, California, collected and curated by Lisbet Tellefsen. The archive includes materials produced by an international community that assembled to protect Davis in a campaign to “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners.” It also contains magazines, press photography, court sketches, videos, music, writings and correspondence. Materials also document her activist work in defense of the Soledad Brothers who were at the center of the 1972 case, her teaching and her controversial writings and activities on issues related to freedom, oppression, feminism and prison abolition.
The exhibition is co-curated by Donna Gustafson, curator of American art and Mellon director for academic programs, Zimmerli Art Museum, and Gerry Beegan, professor in the Department of Art and Design at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers-New Brunswick, with the assistance of an advisory group of intersectional scholars, artists, activists, and archivists who participated in the exhibition, catalogue and programming.
“Dr. Davis has been deeply involved in social justice movements worldwide with an emphasis on building communities of struggle for economic, racial and gender justice,” Rutgers-New Brunswick Chancellor-Provost Francine Conway said as she introduced the scholar and activist. “She is especially concerned with tendencies to devote more resources and intention to prison systems rather than to educational institutions, and challenges her audiences to consider a radically different future.”
Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita of history of consciousness and of feminist studies at University of California Santa Cruz, continues her decades-long advocacy to free political prisoners and to one day abolish prisons as the way to keep people safe and free from violence.
“Since the beginning of the struggles to free 20th-century political prisoners we have collectively developed deeper analyses of the world’s dependence on carceral solutions at the expense of providing the resources of this planet to its inhabitants,” Davis said. “This is exactly why we need abolitionist visions more than ever.”
Abolitionism, Davis said, is about imagining possible futures.
“Abolitionism is about reconceptualizing and carving out paths toward an emancipatory future for this planet and all who inhabit it,” she said.
