Yes on R! Yes on J! Shut down mcj! A Decade in abolitionist aesthetics

PRESENTED AS PART OF ORDINARY PEOPLE ON VIEW AT THE LONG BEACH MUSEUM OF ART

On view from October 6, 2023 through January 14, 2024

Yes on R! Yes on J! Shut Down MCJ! A Decade in Abolitionist Aesthetics is a survey exhibition presented by the Crenshaw Dairy Mart. The exhibition expands on the artist collective and arts organization Crenshaw Dairy Mart’s 2020 inaugural exhibition, Yes on R! Archives and Legal Conceptions (Part 1: 2011 - 2013), which examined the early organizing work between several local grassroots abolitionist organizations over the span of nine years. The culmination of these many organizations and coalitions, which include Dignity and Power Now, Reform LA Jails, and Justice LA, together mobilized to implement Measure R on the 2020 Los Angeles, California primary elections ballot, which subsequently passed by a landslide in the same year. This former exhibition and latter, Yes on R! Yes on J! Shut Down MCJ! A Decade in Abolitionist Aesthetics, together explore the historic movement to end jail expansion in Los Angeles for over a decade. These exhibitions also trace how the arts - as either performance, public interventions, collectives, and happenings - have historically been the first response to injustices within the ecosystem of grassroots abolitionist organizing and have respectively culminated towards legislative feats in the directions of decarceration and justice reinvestment, vis-a-vis structural abolition.

This exhibition has been curated by Autumn Breon and alexandre ali reza dorriz

The title of this exhibition adapts a call-and-response for the respective ballot measures and calls to structural abolition through legislation: 

Measure R (Yes on R!), the county-wide initiative giving the Los Angeles County Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission (COC) subpoena power to independently investigate misconduct by the Los Angeles Sheriff Department (LASD) as well as mandating a plan to reduce jail populations and redirect funds to alternatives to incarceration; 

Measure J (Yes on J!), passed in 2020, introducing an amendment to the county’s charter to require a minimum of 10% of the county's general fund be allocated to address the disproportionate impacts of systemic racism through an implementation of community investments such as youth development, job training, small business development, supportive housing services and alternatives to incarceration, structurally reducing the funding available for the LASD; 

MCJ (Shut Down MCJ!), or Men’s Central Jail, being one of the largest jail facilities in the United States, operated by the LASD, and subject of decades of scrutiny and controversy, most notably the ACLU of Southern California’s 2011 report, Cruel And Usual Punishment: How A Savage Gang Of Deputies Controls LA County Jails, and in more recent years has been subject of contestation between organizers and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors (LACBOS) in their inconsistency of the formerly stated commitment to the closure, depopulating, decarceration, and demolition of the jail.

The research as part of this exhibition has been informed by the theory of abolitionist aesthetics. Developed by Crenshaw Dairy Mart co-founder Patrisse Cullors alongside her community and cohort abolitionist aesthetics is examined in the publication of Abolitionist Aesthetics and the Abolitionist Movement: Los Angeles Grassroots Organizations and the Aesthetic Foundations of Real-time Abolition authored by Crenshaw Dairy Mart co-founders Patrisse Cullors and alexandre ali reza dorriz for the UCLA Law Review. In several case studies, through interviews with movement leaders, organizers, and artists alike, the article studies the tools and strategies for protest employed by contemporary Los Angeles based artists, collectives, and organizations, highlighting the utilization of a distinct language of aesthetics as a principal instrument for abolition in the contemporary abolitionist movement. The article elaborates that the  instrumentalization of aesthetics through a myriad of performances, exhibitions, public activations, and interventions address the abolition of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) in such an accessible and effective manner that they have frequently moved on to creating organizations which influence policy change. 

The case studies and central themes as part of the law review article and this survey exhibition have been organized through notable works in performances, collectives, and projects alongside the respective organizations, policy work, or healing initiatives they have birthed. This exhibition celebrates the labor of organizers and grassroots abolitionist movement workers. It also honors their individual and collective efforts to implement alternatives to the carceral state, the call-and-response nature of community organizing, the recorded successful halting of jail expansion legislation, and the healing through community building initiatives. This exhibition candidly shares only portions and glimpses of a much larger story. Each of these case studies have been incorporated into the robust curricular handbook and curriculum rubric created by the Crenshaw Dairy Mart for their inaugural Crenshaw Dairy Mart Fellowship for Abolition and the Advancement of the Creative Economy (CDM-FAACE) in a chapter entitled Notable Works for the Advancement of Abolitionism in Grassroots Los Angeles Abolitionist Organizations. The chapter builds upon the methodologies and modalities of the arts employed by these grassroots abolitionist organizations that specifically utilize a language of aesthetics as an instrument for abolition. These case studies provide a blueprint to how the arts have been instrumentalized, mobilized, and employed in the development of a potential rubric for cultivating a culture of embodied abolitionism for generations of artists to come. This culture of embodied abolitionism imagines the arts’ engagement with policy work as a resonant vehicle for abolitionist organizing in order to dismantle the prison state.