Pricing and Specification: Corcraft* and 91020000 (Sightlines)
Excerpt of Pricing and Specification: Corcraft* and 91020000 published in Sightlines journal. This essay analyses American sculptor and conceptual artist Cameron Rowland’s exhibition 91020000 alongside Corcraft’s “pricing and specification” guides. Corcraft is the brand name of New York State’s correctional industries program, a group of prison factories where incarcerated individuals work for an average of 22 cents per hour to produce goods that are sold to public institutions throughout New York. 91020000 contained several items purchased directly from Corcraft. While Rowland referenced the catalogs to purchase many of the physical objects for the exhibition, this analysis zooms into the significance of the catalogs themselves, positing that they carry an ideological weight that is historically loaded. By scrutinizing the Corcraft “pricing and specification” guides as graphic artifacts, I show that the catalogs function as a bureaucratic site for disguising the link between present-day incarceration and chattel slavery in the United States, informing a deeper investigation of Rowland’s exhibition. The subtext that is intentionally occluded by the Corcraft catalogs—but which remains present in palimpsests and traces of an ongoing lineage of Black exploitation—is foregrounded by Rowland’s work, which plots the sinister transition from chattel slavery to prison labor by revealing the latent histories embedded in innocuous material objects.
Learning Guide: Question Bridge: Black Males in America (Aperture)
Developed this resource for Aperture to complement their publication Question Bridge: Black Males in America.
Education resource: Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and tete-a-tete (Aperture)
Created this educational resource to accompany Aperture’s traveling exhibition of Mickalene Thomas’ photographs: Muse.
Teacher resource: The Open Road (Aperture)
Developed this resource to accompany Aperture traveling exhibition and publication The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip.
Learning Guide: Larry Fink on Composition and Improvisation (Aperture)
Created learning guide to accompany Aperture’s publication Larry Fink On Composition and Improvisation.
Learning Guide: Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic Image (Aperture)
Created learning guide to accompany Aperture’s publication Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic Image.