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Since 2012, Chicago-based artist Maria Gaspar has interrogated the spatial and social dynamics of the Cook County Jail, the largest single-site jail in the US. With its enormous presence in her native Little Village neighborhood, Gaspar has intervened with the jail’s fortified walls to bring its visibility and invisibility into view. She has also offered new channels of communication for the incarcerated and neighboring residents through radio and visual broadcasts. At the heart of her practice, spanning installation, sound, and photography, is how co-creating with communities becomes a means for imagining a liberated present and future in which the US carceral system is undone. 

At Gallery 400, Gaspar presents We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (after Angela Davis), a commissioned performance on a sonic sculpture made of glass rods cast from salvaged iron prison bars from the now-demolished Division I building, the oldest section of Cook County Jail. The project began in 2023, and Gaspar has invited several musicians to compose, improvise, and perform scores that extend her inquiry into what liberation sounds like. For this iteration, Chicago-based vibraphonist Thaddeus Tukes performs a new experimental composition in the main Gallery’s space. Projected in the background is Clamour, a 60-hour video documenting Division I’s demolition in 2021. Through sight, sound, and touch, Gaspar and Tukes immerse audiences in prison “abolition as a durational process with different speeds.”

Following the performance, Gaspar and Tukes are joined for a conversation with Denny Mwaura, Assistant Director and Curator of Exhibits. Food and refreshments will be served.

ACCESS INFORMATION: This program is free. The performance will not be amplified on speakers. First row seats will be reserved for our hard-of-hearing audience. For questions and access accommodations, email gallery400engagement@gmail.com.

ABOUT

Maria Gaspar is a Chicago-born, first-generation, interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s body of work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. For the past decade, Gaspar has been recognized nationally for her multi-year projects that attempt to dismantle borders, transcend penal matter, and turn places of precarity into places of possibility. Formative works like Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall and the 96 Acres Project include site interventions at the largest single-site jail in the country, the Cook County Department of Corrections, in her childhood neighborhood. 

Gaspar has received the Guggenheim Award for Creative Arts, the Latinx Artist Fellowship, the United States Artists Fellowship, the Frieze Impact Prize, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar’s projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including MoMA PS1 and El Museo Del Barrio in New York, NY; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA; the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Thaddeus Tukes is a composer and percussionist. Presented as the “World’s Best Vibraphonist” by World Expo 2020 in Dubai, his virtuosity and creativity “brings poetry to the vibraphone” (Chicago Tribune, 2019), which has captivated audiences around the world, including Carnegie Hall in New York City, Symphony Center in Chicago, and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. As one of “Chicago’s Hidden Gems” (CBS, 2023), Tukes honors the legacy of the jazz tradition and beyond. In 2020, Tukes formed the Chicago Freedom Ensemble, a music performance and social justice advocacy organization. The group has supported and led protests, provided political and financial literacy for the local music community, conducted jam sessions throughout the city, and created a citywide network of young multicultural instrumentalists. A former member of Chicago’s Gallery 37/After School Matters Center for the Arts Advanced Jazz Band program, Tukes is currently the director of its jazz band. He graduated with a combined bachelor’s degree in Jazz piano and vibraphone studies from Northwestern University, and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in music therapy from Illinois State University.