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\u201cAngola Prison, 1980,\u201d by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick.<\/p>\n
For several weeks in February and March, the Whitney Museum\u2019s fifth-floor gallery has been drenched in the slamming of gates, the rattling of keys and the bellowing of prisoners and guards. The artist Andrea Fraser recorded the sounds at Sing Sing, the infamous prison 34 miles up the Hudson River, then fed them into a gallery that\u2019s roughly the same size as the prison\u2019s A Block.<\/p>\n
\u201cDown the River,\u201d her commanding work, alludes to the practice of separating slaves \u2014 and prisoners to this day \u2014 from their families and sentencing them to backbreaking labor on the South\u2019s cotton plantations. It is a show that prods viewers to consider \u201cthe institutional and symbolic polarization that increasingly defines American society,\u201d Ms. Fraser said.<\/p>\n
Artists around the country are grappling with America\u2019s incarceration system, as a subject and a social force. Like Ms. Fraser, Cameron Rowland\u2019s show<\/a> at Artists Space engaged a privileged art world with the economic mechanisms behind mass incarceration, focusing on how our society benefits from prisoners\u2019 labor.<\/p>\n