The Luminary and civil rights law firm ArchCity Defenders, Inc. have partnered for our spring exhibition season with the group exhibition America’s Mythic Time. Save the date for the opening reception on Saturday, Feburary 8th from 7 to 9pm.

America’s Mythic Time is an exhibition focused on the devastating impacts of racial profiling, police brutality, and mass incarceration on the poor and communities of color, as well as forms of resistance and liberation both through the legal system and within community organizing and artists’ efforts. Referencing Hortense Spillers’s notion of “mythic time” – a capture of both time and bodies that enables continued exclusion and violence – the exhibition presses the ways in which over-policing and incarceration arrives to already oppressed communities first, but also poses that forms of liberation originate within these same spaces.

America’s Mythic Time, curated by James McAnally with Katherine Simóne Reynolds, brings together profound new and recent works from American Artist, Maria Gaspar, Kahlil Robert Irving, Jordan Weber, WORK/PLAY and ephemera from a range of St. Louis-based activists and organizers including Close the Workhouse and The Bail Project. The exhibition will be extended through public programs developed by ArchCity Defenders, including a small reading library, a screening of Wade Gardner’s documentary film Marvin Booker Was Murdered, and a public Close the Workhouse session at the Deaconess Foundation.

Founded in 2009, ArchCity Defenders has grown from a firm of three volunteer lawyers to a full fledged holistic legal advocacy organization with 25 staff. Since its founding, ArchCity has represented thousands of people in nearly every municipal court in the region, as well as filed bigger civil rights lawsuits challenging underlying abuses like inhumane jail conditions, inadequate homeless shelter, cash bail, and modern day debtors’ prisons.

This exhibition is meant to extend Arch City Defenders’ ongoing work, bringing together the work of artists, activists, organizers and legal advocates to create a resonant and urgent exhibition on one of our region and nation’s most urgent crises. America’s Mythic Time will remain on view through March 21st, 2020.

Image: American Artist, 2015, courtesy of the artist, Koenig & Clinton, and Queens Museum.