Home Free: Ohio Artists Envision Prison Abolition brings together work by currently and formerly incarcerated artists, each using their creative practice to imagine a world beyond punishment. Featuring painting, sculpture, quilting, photography, and multimedia works, the exhibition explores the conditions and lived experiences of incarceration while considering resilience, identity, beauty, healing, and the possibilities of a free future.
Originally curated by Returning Artists Guild co-founder Aimee Wissman and Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, Home Free debuted at the Fitton Center for Creative Arts in Hamilton in 2023 and has continued to evolve as a touring exhibition.
The exhibition opened at the University of Akron’s Institute for Human Science & Culture on August 19, 2025, and remains on view in the Lynn Rodeman Metzger Galleries.
Curatorial Statement
Home Free: Ohio Artists Envision Prison Abolition explores the conditions, creative expression, and aesthetic practices of Ohio artists directly impacted by the criminal legal system and who are uniquely positioned to interrogate mass incarceration as a means to safety, justice, and rehabilitation.
Some artists draw direct attention to the realities of mass incarceration and experiences within prisons, while others turn toward beauty, resilience, identity, and the possibility of a free future. Many of the works are shaped by the function and passage of time in prison, with materials and creative processes reflecting artists’ relationships with time and the carceral environment.
Together, the works ask audiences to look beyond limited narratives about people who have been incarcerated and to consider what liberation, safety, justice, and homecoming might look like beyond the carceral state.
Curated by Aimee Wissman and Nicole R. Fleetwood
This is a RAG-hosted event.