Founding member

Aimee Wissman

RAG Cofounder | Social Practice and Interdisicplinary Visual Artist

Founding member

Aimee Wissman is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes large-scale painting, installation, drawing, and mixed media. Her work explores memory, dreams, trauma, incarceration, chronic mental illness, and the fractured experience of time through figurative, abstracted, and symbolic imagery.

As co-founder and Co-Executive Director of the Returning Artists Guild, Aimee has helped build an artist-led organization dedicated to supporting justice-impacted artists through exhibitions, professional development, direct support, and community care. Working at the intersection of contemporary art and abolition, her practice investigates how creativity can serve as a tool for healing, resistance, and transformation while creating opportunities for other artists impacted by incarceration.

Artist statement

Large-scale paintings and site-specific installations explore memory, dreams, trauma, incarceration, chronic mental illness, and the breakdown of time through figurative, abstracted, and symbolic imagery. My practice developed while working in small, confined spaces. Upon release and with the investment in a studio space, I began working on a large scale as an act of taking up space and a resistance to all the ways I have been made small and not taken seriously.

I was fighting to be heard, and that fight continues through a process of experimentation, revision, and discovery. I have never painted anything correctly the first time. Each piece builds through layers and layers of surface, allowing imagery to emerge from emotion, memory, and the unconscious.

Creative practice is both an investigation and a release valve for the things that continue to live in my body and mind. Memories, dreams, and traumas bleed together, and making becomes a way to investigate, process, and transform what I cannot always separate or understand.

Calendar items featuring Aimee Wissman

September 7, 2019 | Columbus, Ohio

Cloud City

Cloud City 614 featured an immersive RAG installation using art and interactive experiences to explore incarceration in Columbus, Ohio.

September 22, 2019 | Columbus, Ohio

Grind/Time

RAG’s first gallery exhibition, Grind/Time uses contemporary art to spark dialogue about mass incarceration, the prison system and societal re-entry.

February 2020 | Hamilton, OHio

Through the Wire

Through the Wire featured art by currently and formerly incarcerated Ohio artists at the Strauss Gallery in Hamilton, Ohio.

June 2020 | Virtual

Trust the Process

Trust the Process featured art by currently and formerly incarcerated Ohio artists exploring recovery, incarceration and creative expression.

November 4, 2021 to January 14, 2022 | Columbus, Ohio

Bridging the Distance

Bridging the Distance featured art and poetry by incarcerated Ohio artists exploring isolation, barriers and human connection during COVID-19.

June 22 to September 14, 2024 | Cincinnati, Ohio

Imagining Abolition: Family Reunion

Imagining Abolition: Family Reunion featured incarcerated, formerly incarcerated and exonerated Ohio artists exploring prison abolition through art.

February 26, 2025 | Worthington, Ohio

A World Reimagined: The Work of Abolition

A World Reimagined: The Work of Abolition was a Feb. 26, 2025 panel discussion in Worthington, Ohio, held alongside the Home Free exhibition.