CARCERAL COMPLICITY

Carceral Complicity explores architecture’s role in the inception and perpetuation of punitive environments, examining how architects, policymakers, and society at large contribute to maintaining minimal standards of spatial confinement through complicity. While just a portion of the spaces I study, this exhibition features a range of art, models, drawings, and photographs documenting prisons, penitentiaries, jails, and immigration detention centers across different historical periods and geographic contexts. Some ole, some new, and some typologies and philosophies borrow through time. In the center, an interactive installation. An abstract prison cell built to the specifications and minimum standards of the Texas Penal Code. Patrons were free to engage with the prison cell to experience firsthand how law, policy, and building codes shape the carceral environment.

This exhibition was drawn from my terminal portfolio for my Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (Architecture & Sociology), The History and Standardization of American Carceral Environments. The exhibition was held in Lubbock, Texas at the Charles Adams Studio Project’s 5&J Gallery as a part of the First Friday Art Trail Exhibition Series for the month of August, 2025.