War Abolition

Organized with incarcerated veteran artists, War Abolition foregrounds visions of freedom, refusal, and collective survival that emerge from within the carceral state. The exhibition begins from a core abolitionist insight: prisons are not separate from war, nor merely analogous to it, but part of the domestic infrastructure through which militarized violence is organized, racialized, and sustained. 

For decades, incarcerated organizers and anti-prison activists have understood prisons as tools of counterinsurgency, colonial control, racial capitalism, and state violence. As Orisanmi Burton argues, prisons are “state strategies of race war, class war, colonization, and counterinsurgency,” but also “domains of militant contestation” where captive communities create zones of autonomy, freedom, and liberation.

Within this framework, War Abolition presents art as a practice of resistance under carceral conditions. The exhibition asks how veteran experience, imprisonment, and antiwar politics might be understood together—not as separate histories of violence, but as linked struggles against militarized dispossession, abandonment, captivity, and premature death. The works gathered here insist that abolition is not only a demand to end prisons and war, but a practice of building the social, material, and imaginative conditions for life beyond them.

Featuring artists John Avaloy, Reginald BoClair, Darrell Fair, Kevin Golar, Sarah Ross, and Devon Showers.