JOSE COTTO with YOUNG ARTISTS MOVEMENT (YAM)
In a Landscape Without Prisons, We Feel. 2022, Archival pigment print
“Close your eyes and imagine waking up to a landscape without prisons. What feelings rush through your body as you walk through your front door and into this world? What shifts are visible in your immediate community? Who do you see and don’t see? What scents and sounds fill the air? How are people able to move, commune, and exist differently in this environment? How are you different in this landscape? How does it feel to be—here?”
These are images of Young Artist Movement participants who worked with artist Langston Allston on a community mural. The photographs resulted from guided meditations, conversations, and reflections on how we might physically, emotionally, and spiritually experience the world around us differently, in a society that rejects carceral systems. After discussing the themes and imagery explored in their collaborative work, I invited everyone to close their eyes and allow themselves to go through the motions of a full day, taking as much time as they needed, to inhabit a New Orleans without prisons. Once they returned to the space, we made these portraits to document their journey and capture the feelings that emerged from the process.
Jose Cotto (b. 1989, Worcester, MA; based in New Orleans, LA) is an interdisciplinary artist and designer who grew up in Great Brook Valley. His creative practice explores relationships between people, place, and time—and often integrates poetry, carpentry, architecture, mark-making, and lens-based media. Cotto’s work has been featured by Paper Monuments, Antenna Gallery, and the Contemporary Art Center; and recognized by artist residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center and A Studio in the Woods. Calling New Orleans home since 2012, Cotto earned a Master’s of Architecture from Tulane University in 2014, following his studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a 2018 Salzburg Global Seminar Cultural Innovators Fellow. In his current role at the Albert and Tina Small Center of Collaborative Design, Cotto leads a seminar course on public space in New Orleans, working with Tulane students to explore critical connections between our built environment and social fabrics.
INSTAGRAM jccotto
