April 3rd - May 31st
2025
Allen-Golder Carpenter presents a site specific installation titled “Thug Cube.” The installation is a four-sided, life-size collage of found imagery and original poetry and houses a video sculpture and other object. The project is concerned with the school-to-prison pipeline that traps many marginalised youth within a cycle that shuffles them from one institution to another. Making use of lived experience, the artist takes inventory of what can persist such circumstances.
The installation will pair with a performance that will activate the space with original spoken word and music production, serving conceptually as a narration for the project.
Growing up, the local high school, the one that I eventually ended up going to, Bladensburg High School, had this reputation and joke going around about how much it resembled a jail. So one day I put out a survey, asking people to choose from one of four images, one of them being my school, and the other three being youth jails. The exercise asked people to try and guess which of the four institutions depicted was the school that I attended, peoples guesses were overwhelmingly wrong. After a sum of over 500 responses, only about 80 people guessed correctly, which comes to only 16 percent. Since people mostly thought that all the other buildings looked more like schools than the one that I actually went to, one could extend that to conclude that my school looks the most like an actual jail.
Then I did a little digging and guess what I found. The architecture firm that was responsible for building many of the municipal/public buildings in the county I grew up in, who was also responsible for building my high school as well, was K. Dixon Architecture PLLC. Founded by Howard University graduate Katherine Dixon, who is quoted as having architectural expertise in areas including specifically “justice” and “corrections”, and on the firms website is stated as having relationships to the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. Department of Justice. At the time of publication of the article I found out then, Dixon was “Director of Maryland's Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services' Division of Capital Construction and Facilities Maintenance” which had her overseeing the construction of the then new Baltimore Youth Detention Center (which is image number 4 from the poll). So to sum all of that up, my Highschool was built by people that also essentially build youth jails, and are involved in incarceration in general.
When I was asked to participate in the exhibition Prison Times, I had the idea to present an installation that addressed the school-to-prison pipeline, a phenomenon within the American educational system that facilitates the funneling of marginalized youth, from public schools directly into the prison-industrial-complex, the system of largely private owned prisons that profit from putting people in cages, most infamously from the manufacturing of commercial products using the coerced labor of those in prison, which is modern day slavery.
Young people are thrust into this system through a combination of a lack of academic support and resources that allow them access to meaningful sources of employment, and through environmental conditioning that dissuades you from thinking you can escape your own circumstances. It doesn’t do much to set kids up for success when every day you have to report to a school that looks like a jail. When you have to watch classmates be stopped, searched, and at times even detained on little more than suspicion. When the funding for your school comes from local income tax, and you come from a low income area, people contribute less in taxes, so your poor school essentially has to stay poor. If you live in a high income area, where the tax pool is larger, your school maybe is nicer.
It conditions you to think less of yourself, to be prepared for life in jail, when you treat people like criminals, don’t be surprised when thats what they become. But even then, I resent the term “crime” because it only approaches action from a legal perspective which should never be conflated with morality, especially when most crime exists as a response to conditions of poverty. Many things that large corporations and governments do that end peoples lives around the world are completely “legal”.
Public schools exist as spaces that matriculate you either largely up, or down, typically the “good kids” from the “good school” in the “good area” get into colleges and universities that their “good families” can pay for (or afford loans for). And typically “bad kids” from the “bad schools” in the “bad area” don’t get into college and are stuck in bad jobs, or in bad habits that get them sent to the bad place, prison. Exceptions apply, some schools posture as progressive by allowing marginalized communities a level of access to their institutions. You either go up, and at the top you could end up at a university like Columbia, one of the oldest in the world, founded and funded by those that trafficked human beings from Africa, an institution (that is a corporation) that has investment holdings that have long included shares in private prisons. Or you go down, and all the way at the bottom is prison, that could potentially be owned, in part, by Columbia University. You can either be the slave, or the slave master.
I decided to take a walk around my old school since I still live in the neighborhood and noticed how they had added numbered signs to all the exits, which struck me as eerily familiar to the numbers placed on cell doors in prison, at the front of the installation I have an image of a prison cell door (marked 20) overlayed on top of a door from my school and you can see the number “22” posted to the right of it. Numbers have this violent, dehumanizing quality to them, like the serial numbers that are attached to public school students in the form of student ID numbers or the numbers attached to incarcerated people and their cases.
This installation is also highly concerned with communication, especially through music, and how that communication, and just people in general are able to persist, survive and even thrive despite conditions like those in prisons and adjacent environments.
Communication is a key tool in survival for those inside penal environments, to be able to stay connected to the outside and keep their humanity intact against the oppression of environments that are designed to be wholly inhuman. Communication, in all its forms, particularly music, is one of the greatest tools for disrupting the inhumanity of such spaces, and preserving ones own humanity. One of the biggest aesthetic inspirations for the installations is rapper Glokk40Spaz. In the video sculpture within the installation there is a clip playing from a music video that he recorded on a smuggled cell phone while in jail. People that are locked up exist at odds with the system that confines them, this is directly demonstrated by how jails and prisons attempt to crack down on contraband cell phone usage by inmates. Correctional officers deploy cell signal jammers that block the connection for the smuggled phones, rendering them useless. When I looked up cell jammers, I originally wanted to have one in the installation but decided against it. Not only because it was cost prohibitive (they can be quite expensive and I wasn’t going to pay for it), but also because although they are not illegal to own, it is a federal crime to actually turn them on, so probably can’t take them on a plane.
Visually I noticed that jammers are sometimes covered with numerous radio antennas, because cell signals operate using radio frequencies, and jammers work by flooding the area with such a high concentration of radio signals that it disrupts cell signals ability to reach through. Which leads to the presence of the radio antennas in the installation, that are tied to tooth brushes and laid out on the table. These disembodied antennas can allude to radios which are tools of direct communication, or they could reference signal jammers that block that communication, these two concepts that are at odds with each other. Shanks and shivs are a form of makeshift weapon crafted in prisons, consisting of either some kind of item filed down to a sharp point, or some kinds of sharp edge item grafted onto some kind of handle, tooth brushes are classically the most associated item with these methods, used as both handle and filed to a point. Instead of grafting a razor to tooth brushes, I attached radio antennas to them. The antenna being this reference to communication, to the disruption of it, and to the disruption of space. Glokk40spaz making those music videos in jail was a truly radical act because he used his method of communication, music, to “disrupt” his space, and essentially defend himself from his environment, thats what the radio shivs symbolize.
I will leave off with this story, when I was in high school, a rapper from my neighborhood, Lil Dude, was in a beef with another rapper, and since Lil Dude was from the neighborhood, many people in my school and people I grew up with knew him personally so the school was quite invested in the beef. Lil Dude released an anticipated diss track in response to the rapper he was feuding with, and when it came out, we were playing it in class and the other students were so excited and worked up while singing along to the song some of them began to jump on tables and desks and loudly sing the lyrics. Disrupting the space, the space of this school, that looked like a jail, was built by those that build jails, a place where students at times are treated like criminals. Through this radical disruption of the standards of the space, maybe new norms and standards can be established. Enslaved Africans sung songs with instructions hidden in the lyrics that detailed the path to freedom, incarcerated people rap and sing to cope and pass the time like the clip of DC native Momolu S.K. Stewart from the Thug Life in D.C. documentary used in the installation. Fuck the system you can’t take away our voice.
- Allen-Golder Carpenter