JUVENILE The study of art that does not result in making the strong less willing to oppose the weak means little. -Booker T. Washington Juvenile In Justice Exhibition Packet
On any given day, approximately 70,000 young people are in juvenile detention or correctional facilities.
Nearly 3 of every 4 youth confined in a residential facility for delinquency are not in for a serious violent felony crime.
JUVENILE For the past six years photographer Richard Ross has documented the placement and treatment of American juveniles housed by law in facilities that treat, confine, punish, assist and, occasionally, harm them. To date, the project includes photographs and interviews with more than 1,000 juveniles at over 200 facilities in 31 states in the U.S., from detention, correction, and treatment facilities to group homes, police departments, and juvenile courtrooms. The work exists at the juncture of art, social practice, and politics with the goal of creating interest and action that goes beyond liking or sharing.
Holland Cotter reviews the exhibition in the New York Times: Any hazy line between photojournalism and art evaporates in Richard Ross s Juvenile-in-Justice, at Ronald Feldman. The pictures in this solo show come from five years that Mr. Ross spent visiting some 200 juvenile detention facilities in 31 states, photographing and interviewing inmates, male and female, ranging in age from 10 to their early 20s, with most in their mid-teens. The prisons in the photographs are often clean, plain, almost blank spaces, not all that different from contemporary art galleries and, it would seem, similarly conceived, though with different dynamics of power. The white-box gallery is intended as a timeless, cultureless space that gives forceful visibility to the art contained in it. The prisons are designed to throw figures of prisoners in their Mondrian-red or yellow or black-striped uniforms into sharp, surveillable relief and to disempower them through a kind of cultural neutralizing. Breaking the pictures pristine look are the texts that accompany them, in which the young people photographed all faces are obscured speak of early abuse, material deprivation and emotional disturbance, realities that jail is likely to extend and exacerbate. Conceptually, the show is a sobering trip down the dead-end street that is America s prison system. Visually, it s as gripping as any art around. Conceptually, the show is a sobering trip down the dead-end street that is America s prison system. Visually, it s as gripping as any art around.
Bring the Exhibition to your institution: Rental Fee: Artist Honorarium: Shipping: Insurance: Exhibition content: Space required: Educational material: Availability: Committed exhibitors: Publication: Credit line: Booking information: Shipping Information: $3,000.00 $3,000.00* (for speaking engagement, see next page for information) Borrower must cover incoming shipping from previous venue and return shipping to artist s studio or to a subsequent venue. Responsibility of the borrower, print replacement cost only. Up to 75 photographs, unframed and un-matted. Hung with magnets or pushpins. Variable. Two text panels Inquire for availability. Nevada Museum of Art (2012), Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (2012), Roosevelt University Gage Gallery (2012), Kennesaw State University Art Museum (2012), Ronald Feldman Gallery (2013), Centre d Action Laïque, Charleroi, Belgium (2013), Anzenberger Gallery, Vienna, Austria (2013), Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana (2014), The Ice Box, Philadelphia (2014) Juvenile In Justice (By Richard Ross, 2012) With foreword by Ira Glass of This American Life and an essay by Bart Lubow, Director of the Annie E. Casey Juvenile Justice Strategy Group. Features over 150 photographs and captions. This exhibition tour is organized by Richard Ross. For more information or to book the exhibition at your venue, please contact Richard Ross at studio@richardross.net or office: 805-893-7205, cell: 805-705-7200 The work ships in one 26 x 38 x 4 crate.
JUVENILE Bring the lecture to your institution: With an engaging, multimedia presentation Richard Ross provides an indispensible visual dimension to the understanding of the juvenile justice system, revealing both the obsolete and effective practices currently serving juveniles. Through photographs and audio, the lecture presents a humanizing survey of the lives and narratives of incarcerated youth. These powerful visual testaments will initiate discussion about this faulty system and where change must occur to better serve our most vulenarable kids. Lecture Fee - $3,000.00 For booking inquiries or questions please contact us at studio@richardross.net or 805-705-7200. *Excludes nominal travel costs and lodging. A portion of the travel costs are generously supported by a grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Recent reviews: Richard Ross: Ronald Feldman Gallery After photographing prisons in the U.S and elsewhere in his series The Architecture of Authority, Ross turns his attention to the equally overpopulated and inhumane system of juvenile detention and incarceration. The big color portraits are blunt documents-- cold and effective. Cells are stripped bare, often outfitted with little more than a shelf to sleep on and a toilet; the occupants-- boys and girls, some as young as ten-- turn away from the camera or have had their faces digitally obscured to insure their privacy. On wall labels, some of the inmates recount their stories. Though few claim to be innocent, none deserve to be in the hell pictured here. The New Yorker, January 28, 2013 Arresting Images: Richard Ross...: Inside a Kansas detention center, a 12-yearold boy sits alone in a cinder block cell, completing a homework assignment on Old Yeller and trying to make it through a two-week lockup punishment for expressing pent-up anger to a parked car. In Nevada, a barefoot eight-year-old, arrested for being violent in school, stands in a bleak, empty room and waits all day for his mother, who can t immediately pick him up for fear of losing her job. The two startling portraits belong to a series ofphotographs all shot by Richard Ross that document the imprisonment of American youth. The understated display here (the unframed images are simply pinned to the wall) pulls you close, face-to-face with troubled kids. Their own words, recorded by Ross in interviews, appear on text panels stories of family strife, confessions of guilt, and a doleful resignation to a vast, often harsh system that doesn t offer anyone much chance for rehab. Ross s compositions capture that quiet misery. Other photos survey methods of severe control, using a cool formality to mirror the sense of cruelty. Beds and chairs designed for restraint, seen one after the other, conjure visions of torture. -The Village Voice, January 23, 2013
In 2012 Juvenile In Justice the book was published, with over 150 photographs and essays by Ira Glass of public radio s This American Life and Bart Lubow of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The book won the American Library Association s Alex Award 2013 and is shortlisted for the Ridenhour Prize. A selection of photographs from Juvenile In Justice were featured in Harper s Magazine, for which the piece won the American Society of Magazine Editors National Magazine Award for News and Documentary Photography 2012. The work has also been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Associated Press, the Huffington Post, and on NPR, Wired.com, Newsweek s Daily Beast, PBS News Hour, and more. Richard Ross has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Fulbright, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Ross was the principal photographer for the Getty Museum on many of their architectural projects. He has photographed for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, SF Examiner, COLORS, and more. A dozen books of his work have been published including Architecture of Authority (Aperture 2007), Waiting for the End of the World (Princeton Architectural Press 2005), Gathering Light (University of New Mexico 2001) and Museology (Aperture 1988). Ross has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 1977. Richard Ross has lectured nationally and internationally on the project at the 2011 AIA Academy of Architecture for Justice National Conference, the Vera Institute for Justice, Pennsylvania State University, UC Los Angeles, the Justice for Youth Summit at American University, the National Symposium on Juvenile Services, Seventh International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, the 2012 Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative Conference, MacArthur Foundation s 2012 Models for Change conference, the 2012 California Public Defender s summit meeting and more.