Shandaken Projects is pleased to announce a new billboard by Maggie Hazen, appearing on Greene County Route 23A in Hunter, NY, just across the street from Scribner's Lodge (7451 Main Street, Hunter) from August 1 through 28. This presentation is part of the exhibition A Copious Flow, organized by Shandaken Projects and co-sponsored by the Athens Cultural Center.
Entitled Hidden in Plein Sight, this artwork ties Hazen's extensive work with incarcerated individuals to ideas of "the Hudson Valley."
The work offers a view of a Hudson Valley landscape, a reproduction the painting View on the Catskill—Early Autumn by Thomas Cole, seen from behind a barred window. It reminds viewers that some people are denied access to "public" space like bucolic parkland, and that although prisons are in fact public spaces, they are largely inaccessible to the public. By using a Cole painting to represent landscape in this work, Hazen also prompts difficult and even more critical questions about who is offered access to a pastoral imaginary, and why Americans tend not regard prisons as a constituent element of the identity of their State.
Maggie Hazen is the founder and an active member of the Columbia Collective, which is dedicated to supporting the visibility of young incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists who have been rendered invisible by the system. She is also the founder of the Justice Justice Arts and Media Network (JJAMN), an emergent arts and media production platform supporting the creative freedom of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth in order to help heal cycles of harm, celebrate young creative talent, and respond to the urgent challenge of forging new terrains of justice. Four billboards by formerly incarcerated members of the Columbia Collective were presented in tandem with Hidden in Plein Sight.
JJAMN and Shandaken Projects are both 2023 grantees of Arts in Corrections NYS, a regrant program of New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), facilitated by Wave Farm, working closely with NYS Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (NYS DOCCS). Arts in Corrections NYS supports non-profit arts organizations, in partnership with visiting artists, to design and facilitate a series of 12-week, in-person workshops, providing system-impacted individuals with once-a-week programming in a variety of disciplines including the visual arts, electronic media/film, music, and literature in NYS DOCCS Facilities across New York State.
Although this commission is not a part of the Arts in Corrections NYS program, both organizations' work with incarcerated individuals heavily informed these presentations.
Shandaken: 14x48 is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Maggie Hazen is a New York-based visual artist from Los Angeles who has cultivated an artistic practice spanning sculpture, video, collage, performance, and installation to explore the complex ways in which subjects interact with and perform within the spaces they occupy. Hazen’s work has been exhibited, screened and performed at institutions including The Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY; Foreland Contemporary Art Campus, Catskill, NY; Pulse Miami Beach as part of Pulse Play, Miami, FL; The Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, CA; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; among others. Hazen has held residencies at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; The Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, Shanghai, China; I:O residency at the Helikon Art Center, Izmit, Turkey; Vermont Studio Center in Vermont; and The Pasadena Side Street Projects, Pasadena; CA. She participated as a fellow in the Bronx AIM program and The Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.