UIC alum presents ‘sonic sculpture’ using prison bars at Gallery 400
The walls of the Cook County Jail loomed large in the landscape of Maria Gaspar’s childhood. The 96-acre complex made a powerful impression on the artist as the largest structure in her Little Village (La Villita) neighborhood.
That impression stayed with her and informed her work when she came to UIC to earn her master’s degree in fine arts in 2009.
She credits the mentorship of UIC professors Dianna Frid and Deborah Stratman with helping her discover how to focus her work at the university using multimedia and interdisciplinary practices. At the time, she was making community-based art and clarifying her artistic goals.
Since then, much of Gaspar’s work as a performance and multimedia artist has focused on prisons and the impact they have on the residents who live outside the prison walls.
“It led me to questions about how a prison is both visible and invisible at the same time,” she said. “Not just the physical aspect of the place of incarceration, but also in a political sense, in our political consciousness, in our psyche.”
At 6 p.m. on July 23, Gaspar will return to UIC’s Gallery 400 to present “We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (after Angela Davis),” which she describes as a sonic sculpture. She created it from 18 prison bars she salvaged from a demolished portion of the Cook County Jail’s Division I and put together as a xylophone-type musical instrument.
Local musician Thaddeus Tukes will perform a new experimental composition on the sculpture in the main gallery space while part of a Gaspar-produced video documenting the jail’s demolition in 2021 plays behind him. Following the free performance, Gaspar and Tukes will be joined for a conversation with Denny Mwaura, Gallery 400’s assistant director and curator of exhibits, who commissioned the piece.
“I was excited by its creative and social potential in assessing what it means to be free and the kind of forms freedom takes,” said Mwaura. “Incarceration affects so many of us, directly and indirectly, and the work addresses this social problem through a very poetic musical and architectural intervention, one that’s also deeply collaborative and cathartic.”
Gaspar spoke to UIC today about her work and her connection to UIC. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What inspired the creation of “We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat?”
Since 2012, I’ve been working in prisons. I grew up a few blocks away from the largest single-site jail in the country. It’s 96 acres in size, and when I was doing public art in Chicago, I started to think about what it means to have the largest architecture of your neighborhood be a jail. The carceral landscape is not only embedded within the confines of the physical barrier walls, but also how it permeates all aspects of our lives.
When I heard that Division I of the jail was being demolished, I started filming the demolition. I met many passersby, and people would ask me what I was doing. I met guards, people going to court and formerly incarcerated people who spent time in Division I. One of the folks that I met was a judge who gave me a cell bar as a gift. It was like a memento of this historic jail. Being handed a bar was a really strange and surreal experience. I scavenged some more. I was able to collect 18 cell bars. They were original, built in the early 1920s, so, you know, pure steel.
How would you describe the work and how it will be presented at Gallery 400?
“We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (after Angela Davis)” is a sonic sculpture made of jail cell bars that are played and activated by different musicians. I decided to play the bars like a xylophone, because I was interested in working with the raw material and hearing their natural resonances and embedded stories. I’ve been presenting the project since 2023. The 18 bars are laid on resonators that are made of wood. There’s a hole, and there’s string, and the bars are laying on each of those resonator boxes. And so, what happens is that the sound is really permeating the space more beautifully and deeply.
The musician can perform the bars in whatever way they choose. I usually collaborate with musicians that I find are doing some interesting work musically, but that are also politically aligned to what the work represents. And then it’s up to them to take it on and see what can happen.
Behind the musician, I show a clip of that 60-hour video where you see one building being demolished over time. So you are seeing the unbuilding of the prison and hearing the sounds of the bars being liberated and the sounds coming out of these materials that kept people apart for many years.
Why was it important for you to bring this performance to UIC’s Gallery 400?
I really like what Gallery 400 stands for. I like their curatorial vision, and I think they’re doing really great work from curatorial projects about art education to architecture exhibits involving Mexican architects. They have a wonderful range of programming, and I think it’s smart programming and programming that is very relevant to the City of Chicago and beyond. It’s an honor for me to return to my alma mater and present my work, and to present it within a community that is never fixed. It’s always changing and always evolving. And so I’m excited to see how the work is going to be experienced in that space.
I’m from here, and the work is about Chicago, but it’s also about issues beyond the city. I hope people leave with questions, and I hope people leave with a challenge to their own perceptions.
