Tameca Cole

Tameca Cole’s work explores the racialized violence, criminalization, and dehumanization inherent in the criminal legal system. Her mixed media approach embodies internal tension, drive and struggle. She incorporates collage to create fragmented, composite images that both speak to the disfigurement and dehumanization of Black people, and to the struggle to reconstruct personhood and reclaim autonomy; an act that is both intimately personal and broadly political for someone whom the justice system sought to reduce to a number.

Working with the limited materials available in the carceral system, Cole’s artistic practice became a means of resistance and survival during a nearly three-decade prison sentence in Alabama. Her work—created in the belly of the U.S. prison system and never intended for an art world audience— grapples with the lived physical, psychological, and emotional experience of incarceration and punishment. She draws on potent symbolism, invoking incarceration, slavery, U.S. imperialism, and religious iconography.

 Tameca Cole

All images courtesy the artist.

MOMA PS1 - Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration