Voices In the Shadow Book Launch & Artist Talk

SPACE is requiring masks and vaccination for all event attendees. Medical exemptions can be accommodated. Please refer to our current health and safety policies on the SPACE Reader for more information.

Join us for a book launch and talk with artist/curator Elizabeth Spavento and Levi Cruz, a resident of the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Facility and co-organizer of the Voices in the Shadow project alongside Border Patrol, a curatorial collective exploring the intersection between contemporary art and corporate aesthetics and the boundaries of government agency.

Between February and April 2021, members of Border Patrol co-organized an exhibition titled Voices in the Shadow with Mesa Verde ICE Processing Facility residents Levi Cruz, Walter Cruz-Zavala, and William Nickel. The exhibition featured video interviews, hand-made objects, and a small abolitionist library that made public for the first time the detainees’ activist work in support of better living conditions and documented the abysmal food served inside the facility.

Part exhibition catalogue and part archive, the subsequently published Voices in the Shadow book contains letters, portraits, recipes, and exhibition images related to Border Patrol’s ongoing collaboration with detainees at the Mesa Verde facility in Bakersfield, CA.

Fifty copies of the limited edition book will be made available to the public at this event. An additional fifty copies will be available for purchase online beginning October 15, 2021. Proceeds will benefit the current and former residents of Mesa Verde.

This event is presented as part of What Rhymes with Freedom?, an exhibition on view at SPACE, September 11–October 31, 2021, and organized in conjunction with Freedom & Captivity: A Humanities Initiative for an Abolitionist Future—a state-wide public humanities initiative during fall 2021 to bring critical perspectives from the humanities to the interrogation of incarceration.