Maria Gaspar:
We Press Our Hands to the Steel Curtain

Maria Gaspar’s art, research, and activism engage with jails and prisons—their history, architecture, logic, psychology, and time. For the past two decades, Gaspar has focused on Cook County Correctional Facility, located in the Chicago neighborhood of Little Village, where she grew up. The largest single-site jail in the United States, the facility holds an average daily population of approximately 9,000 people. Working both inside and outside of the institution, Gaspar has produced artistic interventions, workshops for detainees, public arts programming, and has used recording devices to document the jail’s architecture and its surrounding neighborhood. The result is a body of time-based works and sustained engagements that closely study correctional facilities and imagine their undoing.

We Press Our Hands to the Steel Curtain brings together recent work that demonstrates how Gaspar engages with these carceral spaces, deploying time both as a tactic and material. The title is adapted from a line in Gloria Anzaldúa’s poem and essay “The Homeland, Aztlán/El otro México.” In dialogue with Anzaldúa’s writing, Gaspar sees walls as structures which shape psychic, social, and cultural terrains. Pressing hands might evoke healing or resistance: in either case, the gesture is dynamic and temporal.

Among works included in the exhibition are Clamour, a 60+ hour video documenting the demolition of one of Cook County Correctional Facility’s housing blocks, from start to finish. Tumbling (2023), a series of photographs also on view, pictures isolated remnants from that same demolition. Bars salvaged from the jail’s cells also reappear in a sonic sculpture designed by Gaspar, which will be activated in the performance We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (after Angela Davis) (2025). The exhibition will also include a newly commissioned work from Gaspar’s ongoing series Disappearance Jail (2021-ongoing), which documents carceral institutions across the United States through postcards. In a special activation, members of the Blaffer Museum's communities will be invited to punch holes in each postcard, a way of visualizing the disappearance of carceral spaces as we know them. Through this work, Gaspar connects histories across the country and invites visitors into solidarity and conversation.

About the Artist

Maria Gaspar is a Chicago-born, first-generation, interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. For the past decade, Gaspar has been recognized nationally for her multi-year projects that attempt to dismantle borders, transcend penal matter, and turn places of precarity into places of possibility. Formative works like “Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall” and the “96 Acres Project” include site interventions at the largest single-site jail in the country, the Cook County Department of Corrections, in her childhood neighborhood.
Gaspar has received the Guggenheim Award for Creative Arts, the Latinx Artist Fellowship, the United States Artists Fellowship, the 3Arts Next Level Award, the Frieze Impact Prize, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar’s projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including MoMA PS1 and El Museo Del Barrio in New York, NY; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA; the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA; the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, FL; and SOMA, Mexico City, Mexico.

Gaspar received her BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, and her MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.