Russell Craig: Carceral Views: The Armory Show 2025

Clubhouse Gallery is proud to present Russell Craig: Carceral Views at The Armory Show 2025, marking the gallery’s debut at the fair.

In Russell Craig: Carceral Views, the Artist transforms the physical and emotional landscape of prison into a meditation on resilience, memory, and humanity. Drawing directly from his own time inside, Craig uses both the literal forms of prison such as doors, windows, and corridors, and the symbolic weight of time and decay to invite viewers into an experience few can imagine, while extending dignity and hope to those who have endured it.

At the heart of the exhibition is The Central Park Five (2025), a series of five monumental prison-door paintings that honor Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise. Their portraits, rendered in the same pastel sticks Craig preserved and carried with him upon release, affirm the individuality of young men who endured extraordinary hardship and whose stories now resonate as symbols of perseverance. Installed sequentially, the doors create the rhythm of a corridor, asking viewers to encounter each face with intimacy and respect.

Two additional doors, Solitary Confinement #1 and #2 (2025), extend this language through abstraction. With surfaces that erode, fade, or close in on themselves, these works suggest the psychic weight of solitary confinement and the sense of a soul slowly slipping from view. Their differing atmospheres resist a single definition, instead holding the shifting and often contradictory emotions that accompany extreme isolation. Abstraction here becomes the visual language by which Craig conveys what cannot be fully seen, opening space for viewers to enter the experience through feeling rather than depiction.

The Prison Window sculptures further translates the architecture of confinement into a meditation on presence and possibility. Modeled on the exact dimensions of prison windows, each carries a handprint pressed onto the surface, gestures inspired by David Hammons’s body prints that signify both the pressure of entrapment and the insistence on selfhood. On the reverse, Craig paints luminous skies, a vision of freedom that affirms imagination as a vital lifeline.

Anchoring the installation is Prometheus (2024–25), a large painting that reimagines Peter Paul Rubens’s mythic subject. In Rubens’s canvas, the Titan who brought fire to humanity is punished and bound by Zeus. For Craig, Prometheus embodies both struggle and endurance, reflecting the human capacity to hold light and hope even under immense pressure.

Throughout the exhibition, Craig incorporates materials that once carried great value in prison life, including ramen noodle packets, coffee bags, potato chip wrappers, leather belts, and cash. These objects, once essential in a fragile economy of barter and care, are here transformed into works of lasting beauty. Colors also carry personal resonance, with orange recalling prison uniforms and turquoise recalling the painted doors of Craig’s cell block. By layering these elements into patient, time-intensive surfaces, Craig aligns himself with the experimental abstraction of Jack Whitten and the material radicalism of Arte Povera, where humble matter bears profound human meaning.

Though born of hardship, Carceral Views ultimately speaks to renewal and endurance. In doors, windows, and skies, Craig transforms the architecture of confinement into an art of witness and hope, affirming that even in the harshest of conditions, imagination and humanity prevail.

Russell Craig (b. 1980, Philadelphia; lives and works in New York) is a self-taught artist whose work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Ford Foundation Gallery, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia, and is represented in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Bunker Artspace (Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection), among others.

The Armory Show 2025

Javits Center

Crystal Palace Entrance

429 11th Avenue, New York, NY 10001

VIP Preview: Thur, Sept 4 | Invitation Only

Fri, Sept 5 | 11am–7pm

Sat, Sept 6 | 11am–7pm

Sun, Sept 7 | 11am–6pm

Valid Armory Show 2025 tickets required to attend all days.