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Silence Speaking Volumes: Artists Confront the Culture of Incarceration

Art meets social action in “Mirror/Echo/Tilt,” which uses gestures to combat stigma — through film and real-life interventions.

A photograph taken from the shoot of “Mirror/Echo/Tilt,” a 2019 video installation by Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo and Sable Elyse Smith. It explores emotions stirred up by policing, surveillance and imprisonment.Credit...Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo, Sable Elyse Smith

Two men sit across the table in a barren visiting room. One is straight-backed and impassive, the other slumped and absent. A third man comes in, raises the slouching one up, places the pair’s hands into a clasp and angles their heads so they look at each other. Then he gently moves away.

Elsewhere, a group watches, from a short distance, someone sleeping on a narrow cot. People stare into peeling walls or out grimy windows. Figures come together tableau-like, as in silent chorus, and hold their pose.

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An excerpt from Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo and Sable Elyse Smith’s “Mirror/Echo/Tilt,” 2019.CreditCredit...

Gestures do the talking in “Mirror/Echo/Tilt,” the video installation that the filmmaker Melanie Crean, the visual artist Sable Elyse Smith, and the performance artist Shaun Leonardo have on view at the New Museum — an unusually intimate meeting of art, education and social action.

Majestic and eerie, the 18-minute video features 22 participants in white Tyvek jumpsuits and, for some, carnival-like masks adorned with mirrored tiles. They enact scenes derived from their experiences with the police, courts, or jail, conveyed in a silent theatrical language where emotions hold sway.

Smaller screens around the gallery confront visitors with outtakes of this material. A resource room has a seminar table and a small library of books — mostly on incarceration, as well as Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” and “Don Quixote.”

And beyond the museum, the artists have used the methods honed in the performance project to design a diversion program — an alternative to jail time that young people facing misdemeanor charges in Brooklyn Criminal Court can complete to have their record sealed.

“Mirror/Echo/Tilt” joins a growing wave of art contending with the 2.2 million adults held in America’s prisons and jails. In 2016, Andrea Fraser wired the empty fifth floor of the Whitney Museum with speakers that played ambient sound recorded at prisons. In recent months, Cameron Rowland’s project “D37, at MOCA Los Angeles, laid out objects in a room that connected chattel slavery with today’s police practice of asset forfeiture; “The Pencil Is the Key,” opening this fall at the Drawing Center, will join works by artists around the world who were once prisoners.

Mirror/Echo/Tilt” has its roots in a literary epiphany. In the summer of 2014, when Michael Brown died at the hands of a police officer in Ferguson, Mo. — three weeks after Eric Garner met a similar fate on Staten Island — Ms. Crean was reading “Don Quixote.”

In the furor over Mr. Brown’s depiction in the news media — including a New York Times profile that labeled the unarmed teenager “no angel” — Ms. Crean, who teaches at Parsons School of Design, heard a resonance of Cervantes’s classic novel and its absurdist plot. In the second half of the two-part epic, the characters Quixote encounters have read the first volume, along with a bogus “sequel,” and they judge him on that basis.

“The character was defamed as being crazy,” Ms. Crean said. “Don Quixote would show up in a town, his reputation would precede him, and he would have to confront it.”

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From left, Melanie Crean, Sable Elyse Smith and Shaun Leonardo at the New Museum. Ms. Crean, a filmmaker, and Ms. Smith, a visual artist, began a collaboration and soon brought in Mr. Leonardo, a performance artist and educator.Credit...Lelanie Foster for The New York Times

The lesson: Society narrates us into roles that can overwhelm us even when we struggle to break free. The stakes are especially high for people in the grip of the justice system, and neighborhoods subject to surveillance and overpolicing.

“Mass incarceration is a type of performance,” Ms. Smith said. “There’s posturing, there’s labeling, all this theatricality, in the way that people either label demographics or play out the theater of oppression.”

The three artists in “Mirror/Echo/Tilt” brought together deep, if unorthodox, expertise. Ms. Crean’s past projects have built on social practice work with various groups in the city, for instance with spoken-word artists in the Bronx or young Muslim women in Queens.

The fast-rising Ms. Smith — she was a 2018-19 artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem — mixes film, text and sculptural installation in her art, but has kept her focus on the culture of incarceration.

Mr. Leonardo explores race, gender and power through performance. In 2015 he developed “I Can’t Breathe,” a hybrid performance and self-defense class where participants learned the chokehold used on Eric Garner — and how hard it is to defend against.

“I was interested in the principles of embodied performance,” Mr. Leonardo said of taking part in “Mirror/Echo/Tilt.” “How we can take information that would otherwise simply live in our minds and dislodge it and move it somewhere else.

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A production still from “Mirror/Echo/Tilt.” All the actors in the work have experienced either prison, or the pressures of life in families or neighborhoods with high rates of policing and incarceration.Credit...Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo, Sable Elyse Smith
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The participants are in white Tyvek suits, and some wear carnival-like masks embossed with mirrors. The artists said that the uniform suits help draw attention to the gestures.Credit...Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo, Sable Elyse Smith

Creating “Mirror/Echo/Tilt” was a gradual process. For several months in 2015, the three held weekly sessions with young people at a Bronx nonprofit, the Point. The next year, assisted by one of the Bronx participants, DeVante Lewis, they worked with a group returning from incarceration through the re-entry support organization Fortune Society.

The beginning was loose — conversation, developing comfort with one another, sharing meals. Eventually a method emerged, as they considered emotions raised by incarceration.

The decision to go wordless in “Mirror/Echo/Tilt” followed naturally. “After just existing together, with personal narratives emerging, in order to organize ourselves around these stories we actually had to remove language,” Mr. Leonardo said.

The locales where they filmed are pungent with history: They include the long-abandoned Bronx borough courthouse; the former Fulton Correctional Facility, also in the Bronx, a minimum-security prison closed in 2011; a long-sealed theater in the former Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, now a city homeless shelter and intake center.

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The resource center for “Mirror/Echo/Tilt” at the museum has a whiteboard, a small library of books and wall-mounted tablets that present a curriculum that the artists developed from the project.Credit...Dario Lasagni
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The artists placed an additional screen displaying outtakes from the film shoot in one of the New Museum’s elevators.Credit...Dario Lasagni
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A screen in the museum bathroom challenges visitors to consider the intrusion of constant surveillance.Credit...Dario Lasagni

The buildings, like the performers, express a kind of identity in flux — edifices emerging from carceral or related uses, if not yet stably dedicated to something else.

Four years in the making, “Mirror/Echo/Tilt” is complete as an art project, in the sense that it has produced a museum show. Outside, however, the work has only begun. Since late 2016 the three collaborators have worked with the artist nonprofit Recess and its partner, Brooklyn Justice Initiatives, on a diversion program for “court-involved” youth.

They have trained facilitators and written a curriculum that others can adapt. “Having an open-source receptacle for this information became a goal,” Ms. Smith said.

Mr. Lewis, the participant from the Point who stayed for the rest of the project, shared that he grew up with family members “constantly going back and forth between prison and home” — experiences that he avoided scrutinizing or talking about.

He had a background in acting, but this wordless method unlocked something new, he said. “It allowed me to present my full self, I guess.” He added: “The best thing I could take away from it is that the body remembers.”

Now working full time for an alternatives-to-incarceration program, Mr. Lewis is turning his attention to the impact of the court and prison system on young women — the gender roles and the demands on their emotional labor — and plans to work toward a syllabus.

“Mirror/Echo/Tilt” has taken shape in an ambiguous time. High-profile deaths of black men following encounters with police, which first prompted the project, have hardly abated. Yet alternative justice programs are spreading, reformers have won election in some cities as district attorneys, and prison abolition is no longer laughed away.

Ms. Crean cast the collaboration not as a work of protest, but rather of imagination.

“If there is a problem — a system — and one has to demonstrate how another way of being is possible, that’s what artists and educators can do,” she said.

The piece, she said, was at once art, education, a social intervention. “It can be accessed from any of those points,” she said. “But for us it’s all of those things.”


Mirror/Echo/Tilt

Through Oct. 6 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, Manhattan; 212-219-1222, newmuseum.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Speaking Loudly Silently. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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