Prison Papers: Reimagining Citizenship

Reimagining Citizenship brings the arts together with research and education to explore questions of citizenship and inform our symbiotic understanding of, and commitment to, the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated.

The project advances courses and workshops on art and citizenship in local carceral settings across South Bend and Chicago, including Inside-Out courses led by Dr. Pam Butler at Westville Correctional Facility and Sam Sokolskiy-Tifft at South Bend Community Reentry Center. It also establishes a collaboration between Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns and Chicago-based organization Walls Turned Sideways to bring historical texts from their Prison Papers exhibition in dialogue with local contemporary expressions of citizenship by those currently and formerly incarcerated. The new joint exhibition will be curated and paired with an exhibition catalogue designed by Notre Dame students under the direction of professor Dave Pabellon.

Credits

Walls Turned Sideways

Walls Turned Sideways was founded in January 2024 after extensive research conducted in 2021 by Pablo Mendoza and Sarah Ross. After interviewing incarcerated individuals, their families, and allied organizations, the researchers identified a need for an abolitionist arts space in Chicago where communities impacted by incarceration connect through art, share knowledge, and support returning residents. Walls Turned Sideways now fills that gap by providing exhibitions, workshops, and resources that use art as a means of advocacy, healing, and community-building.

Discover Walls Turned Sideways Prison Papers Exhibition

Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns

The Institute for Social Concerns is Notre Dame’s scholarly home for interdisciplinary responses to questions of justice. The institute is committed to the normative proposition that a just world is a beautiful world, and the arts play a critical role in its courses, research and community partnerships. The institute seeks to create knowledge in service to justice, focusing on pressing issues—the environment, labor, mass incarceration, migration, poverty, and technology—with rigorous, interdisciplinary, and creative energy.

Discover the Institute for Social Concerns

Pam Butler and Notre Dame’s Gender Studies Program

Dr. Pam Butler is Associate Director and Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Gender Studies Program. Their areas of expertise include: US histories of gender, sexuality, and empire; feminist, queer, and trans theories of race and racialization; reproductive politics; and critical prison studies. Dr. Butler teaches classes both at Notre Dame and at Westville Correctional Center through Notre Dame's Programs for Education in Prison. Dr. Butler is a Flanagan Fellow with the Institute for Social Concerns.

Notre Dame’s Gender Studies program identifies, examines, and challenges injustice while imagining and creating better futures that serve the common good. The interdisciplinary academic unit is home to more than 100 students and more than 60 faculty associated with 22 areas of study across campus.

Pam Butler Discover the Gender Studies Program

Dave Pabellon and Notre Dame’s Department of Art, Art History, and Design

Dave Pabellon is a design educator, researcher, and practitioner under the moniker It Is Just Dave LLC. As a practitioner, Pabellon's studio work consists of identity, publication, and exhibition design, focusing on partnerships with cultural institutions, contemporary artists, and activist organizations. As an academic, Pabellon's research centers on the history and practice of graphic design labor as a means of building solidarity among communities of color and activist spaces.

Art, Art History & Design is a vibrant, multidisciplinary department offering graduate and undergraduate programs in studio art, art history, and design. The department provides students with intellectually informed instruction in critical visual studies within the context of the liberal arts at an international Catholic research university.

Dave Pabellon Discover AAHD

Funding & Support

This is a partner program of the 2027 Notre Dame Arts Biennial, supported with funding from the Notre Dame Arts Initiative.

This project is also made possible with funding from Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns, Gender Studies Program, and Department of Art, Art History, and Design. Reimagining Citizenship is curated in collaboration with Walls Turned Sideways.