No Justice Without Love

No Justice Without Love brings together the transformational work of artists, activists, and allied donors who make up the Art for Justice Fund (A4J) community. The exhibition is an invitation to engage with the Fund’s mission to change the narrative around mass incarceration and disrupt the criminal justice system. Inaugurated in 2017 under the unprecedented philanthropic vision of Agnes Gund, A4J launched with $100M generated from the sale of Agnes’ favorite painting, Roy Lichtenstein’s Masterpiece. This spurred artists, collectors, and supporters to donate an additional $25M to the Fund, which advances policy reform, shifts public narratives on criminal justice, and promotes the leadership of formerly incarcerated people while centering art as a catalyst to propel change.

The exhibition includes work from formerly incarcerated and allied artists alongside submissions by former and current A4J grantees, who have been invited to a Call and Response to express how A4J—and the remarkable community it supports—has affected their practice. In charting the evolution of artists’ practices, No Justice Without Love also presents the ways in which artists and advocates create new aesthetics around humanity, resilience, and self-determination, while elevating themes of redemption, rehabilitation, and transformation.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Daisy Desrosiers is an interdisciplinary art historian and the current director and chief curator of Kenyon College’s Gund Gallery. Previously, she was a co-curator of the first MOCA Toronto Triennale, GTA21, and also served as the inaugural director of Artist Programs at the Lunder Institute for American Art at the Colby College Museum of Art. Earlier in her career, she was the inaugural Nicholas Fox Weber curatorial fellow with the Glucksman Museum in Cork, Ireland and a curatorial fellow at Brooklyn-based nonprofit, Art in General. This year she is also part of the Center of Curatorial Leadership (CCL) cohort of 2023. She contributed to the 2021 New Museum Triennial publication and As We Rise (Aperture, 2021). Desrosiers is currently working on a monographic publication about artist Tau Lewis with the National Gallery of Canada.

Special thanks to Jimmy Wu for inspiring the exhibition title.