Maria Gaspar: We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (after Angela Davis)
July 23, 2025
UIC Gallery 400
Since 2021, Maria Gaspar has interrogated the spatial and social dynamics of Chicago’s Cook County Jail, the largest single-site jail in the US. With its enormous presence in her native Little Village neighborhood, Gaspar has intervened with the jail's fortified walls to bring its visibility and invisibility into view. She has also offered new channels of communication for the incarcerated and neighboring residents through radio and visual broadcasts. At the heart of her practice, spanning installation, sound, and photography, is how co-creating with communities becomes a means for imagining a liberated present and future in which the US carceral system is undone.
For this comissioned performance, Gaspar presents We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (after Angela Davis), a sonic sculpture made of glass rods cast from salvaged iron prison bars from the now-demolished Division I building, the oldest section of Cook County Jail. The project began in 2023, and Gaspar has invited several musicians to compose, improvise, and perform scores that extend her inquiry into what liberation sounds like. For this iteration, Chicago-based vibraphonist Thaddeus Tukes performs a new experimental composition in the main Gallery's space. Projected in the background is Clamour, a 60-hour video documenting Division I's demolition in 2021. Through sight, sound, and touch, Gaspar and Tukes immerse audiences in prison "abolition as a durational process with different speeds."
July 23, 2025
UIC Gallery 400
Since 2021, Maria Gaspar has interrogated the spatial and social dynamics of Chicago’s Cook County Jail, the largest single-site jail in the US. With its enormous presence in her native Little Village neighborhood, Gaspar has intervened with the jail's fortified walls to bring its visibility and invisibility into view. She has also offered new channels of communication for the incarcerated and neighboring residents through radio and visual broadcasts. At the heart of her practice, spanning installation, sound, and photography, is how co-creating with communities becomes a means for imagining a liberated present and future in which the US carceral system is undone.
For this comissioned performance, Gaspar presents We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (after Angela Davis), a sonic sculpture made of glass rods cast from salvaged iron prison bars from the now-demolished Division I building, the oldest section of Cook County Jail. The project began in 2023, and Gaspar has invited several musicians to compose, improvise, and perform scores that extend her inquiry into what liberation sounds like. For this iteration, Chicago-based vibraphonist Thaddeus Tukes performs a new experimental composition in the main Gallery's space. Projected in the background is Clamour, a 60-hour video documenting Division I's demolition in 2021. Through sight, sound, and touch, Gaspar and Tukes immerse audiences in prison "abolition as a durational process with different speeds."
Photo: Maria Gaspar, We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (after Angela Davis), 2023–ongoing. Courtesy of Noah Sheldon.