Unit 2 (part 1) September 2013

Coop Gallery is pleased to present Unit 2 (part 1), an exhibition featuring collaborations between a group of local artists and 11 prisoners on Tennessee’s Death Row.

The works included in this show were all made during the summer of 2013, when members of the group of artists made weekly visits to Unit 2 of the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in northwest Nashville to engage the prisoners in artistic collaborations and intensive discussions.

The show consists primarily of two types of works. It includes collaborative (or “add-on”)drawings that were handed back and forth over the course of the summer and modified with each exchange, and it also includes “surrogate projects” where the insiders asked the outsiders to do and experience things forbidden by their imprisonment. These works showcase an unlikely dialogue across the walls of prison, and they address the aspiration to transcend, albeit imaginatively, the dark realities of incarceration and death.

Members of the group will be on hand at all times during the gallery’s open hours (Fridays and Saturdays, 11-3) to answer questions about the project and about their visits to Death Row.

Unit 2 (part 1) will be the first in a series of exhibitions related to this collaboration.

The artists (along with one critic and art historian) who worked on the exhibition are as follows:

Abu Ali Abdur’Rahman

Mika Agari

Holly Carden

Ann Catherine Carter

Ron Cauthern

Tyrone Chalmers

Jessica Clay

Amy Clutter

Gary Cone

David Duncan

Robert Grand

Kristi Hargrove

Kennath Artez Henderson

Akil Jahi

Nickolus Johnson

Seth Lykins

Donald Middlebrooks

Upreyl Mitchell

Wayne Nichols

Robin Paris

Derrick Quintero

Zack Rafuls

Sharon Stewart

Alanna Styer

Josh Ungurait

Moses Williams

Tom Williams

Weng Tze Yang

Barbara Yontz