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Chicago Tribune

Prison bars fashioned into sonic sculpture for musical performance at Gallery 400

Prison bars that were once used as instruments of confinement at the Cook County Jail will be repurposed as musical instruments as part of a performance Wednesday by Chicago-based artist Maria Gaspar. The performance, titled 'We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (after Angela Davis),' aims to cultivate an environment where the US carceral system is undone, Gaspar said. At Gallery 400 of the University of Illinois Chicago, from which Gaspar graduated, the performance will use a sonic sculpture — made of glass rods cast from iron prison bars salvaged from the now-demolished Division I building, the oldest section of the jail — to express what liberation sounds like. Growing up in Little Village, Gaspar lived only a few blocks from the jail, and it taught her a lot about her community, she said. 'As a kid, for me, Little Village is a neighborhood about resiliency,' Gaspar said. 'It's about pride, cultural pride, it's about struggle and it's about carcerality.' Toward the end of her preteen years, Gaspar said, she was enrolled in a 'scared straight' type of program without her knowledge. She toured Division 1 of the jail for hours, she said, and seeing men behind bars was 'a disturbing experience.' She said she didn't have political awareness because she was so young. 'Now, as an adult with a critical lens and somebody who's a teacher and a mother,' Gaspar said, 'I think what was happening is a kind of fear tactic that was, in many ways, targeting a group of immigrant kids and making them feel like they were criminals.' She sees the experience as the pivotal moment that inspired her to evolve and learn more about politics. Having the jail as the backdrop of her childhood is not only symbolic of the performance, she said, but also how she got her start with the project. In 2021, when Division 1 was being torn down, Gaspar went to the street and recorded the demolition every day, from start to finish. The entire video came out to 60 hours and 20 minutes, and it is now used as a backdrop for the upcoming show. She had no plans for a performance until a judge came up to her one day while she was filming to talk to her. After a few moments, he left and came back to hand her a prison bar. 'That then led to scavenging more of the materials and then creating this sonic structure,' she said. The performance is in collaboration with Thaddeus Tukes, a vibraphonist from Chicago. The two had a connection and didn't know it prior to meeting about this show. Gaspar and Tukes both attended Whitney M. Young Magnet High School on the Near West Side, but at different times. Gaspar chose to collaborate with Tukes, she said, because he understands the ideas behind the project: mass incarceration and abolitionism. Gaspar said she and Tukes both have a history of working in juvenile detention. 'There were a lot of commonalities and I really love Thaddeus' spirit,' she said. 'He's really open. He enjoys improvisation. But he's also this incredible composer, and he's really great at working with people. And I think those are all really wonderful elements for collaboration.' At a time when people are being split up and society feels divided, Gaspar said, she hopes her performance can use sound as a tool to create meaning and a sense of connection. 'I'm really just enjoying this time of exploration and experimentation of thinking about how sound can be both this beautiful visceral experience, but also a very political one too,' she said. Following the free performance, Gaspar and Tukes will hold a conversation with Jimmy Soto, a paralegal and human rights activist.