Maria Gaspar’s We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (After Angela Davis) is a sonic sculpture with live performance activations by guest musicians Damon Locks, Ben LaMar Gay, and Mauricio López F. Composed of salvaged jail debris found following the 2021 demolition of Division I at the Cook County Department of Corrections in Chicago, this work stems from the artist’s sustained engagement with the nearly century-old carceral institution located in Pilsen, her childhood neighborhood.

The title is drawn from a line in Angela Davis: An Autobiography to highlight how community building and collective action are acts of creativity, trust, and transcendence. This concept is manifested in three distinct sculptures—a demolition bucket, a claw, and a grappler used during the jail’s deconstruction—which integrate cell bars to evoke its carceral history while honoring the lives of the individuals once held within. Woven into the physical soundscape and attunement of these bars, are lyrical components from a workshop series Gaspar facilitated at Walls Turned Sideways with poets and writers impacted by the criminal injustice system. Using the metal from the bars as a conductor, the musical improvisations generate a sonic structure of care, support, and release, standing in contrast to those of submission, restraint, and control.

About the Artist

Maria Gaspar is a Chicago-born, first-generation, interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s body of work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. For the past decade, Gaspar has been recognized nationally for her multi-year projects that attempt to dismantle borders, transcend penal matter, and turn places of precarity into places of possibility. Formative works like “Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall” and the “96 Acres Project” include site interventions at the largest single-site jail in the country, the Cook County Department of Corrections, in her childhood neighborhood.

Gaspar has received the Guggenheim Award for Creative Arts, the Latinx Artist Fellowship, the United States Artists Fellowship, the 3Arts Next Level Award, the Frieze Impact Prize, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar’s projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including MoMA PS1 and El Museo Del Barrio in New York, NY; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA; the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA; the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, FL; and SOMA, Mexico City, Mexico. Gaspar received her BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, and her MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.