Cummins Prison Farm, Arkansas from the series Inside the Wire

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Bruce Jackson

American, born 1936

Cummins Prison Farm, Arkansas from the series Inside the Wire, 1973 (printed 2017)

black-and-white inkjet print

Edition: 1/4

sheet: 13 x 19 inches (33.02 x 48.26 cm)

Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

Gift of the artist, 2017

P2017:6.2.5

More Details

Inscriptions

edition notation / front, lower right / 1/4

signature, dated / front, lower left / Bruce Jackson 2017

Provenance

printed by the artist in 2017;
donated by the artist to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, June 20, 2017

Class

Digital prints

Photographs

Work Type

Inkjet print

Black-and-white print (photograph)

This information may change due to ongoing research. Glossary of Terms

Bruce Jackson first began documenting life in America's prisons while researching the music and culture of incarceration in the summer of 1964. He went to Texas to record work songs and started photographing what he observed. A group of these photographs, taken at the Cummins Prison Farm in Arkansas (once considered the most difficult prison in the country), were the subject of the exhibition Bruce Jackson: Cummins Wide at the Albright-Knox in 2009. Many of the workers Jackson photographed were actually toiling on lands that had been slave plantations before the Civil War. As Jackson has written, prisons "continue to be grim places where American society hides its failures . . . the two primary functions shared by American prisons now are providing jobs to people in rural counties who would not otherwise have jobs, and keeping off city streets people the cities don't know what else to do with, about, or for, or just don't want to look at."

Label from Overtime: The Art of Work, March 8–May 17, 2015