Carceral Views: Russell Craig at Clubhouse Gallery

Perhaps one of the most compelling booths at this year’s fair came not from the usual blue-chip suspects, but from a voice shaped by carceral experience. Presented by Clubhouse Gallery, Russell Craig—a graduate of Bard’s Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library—has long been outspoken about criminal justice reform, with work previously featured in Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration at MoMA PS1 and now in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum.

The works circle around the Central Park jogger case—later known as the Central Park Five—where five Black and Latino teenagers were falsely accused, convicted, and decades later exonerated. Craig reanimates the failures of that system not through didacticism but through the stubborn materiality of lived life: woven chip bags, leather, fake U.S. dollars. Materials coded as disposable or counterfeit become the fabric of new scenes—moments of joy, labor, and endurance.

At the center stood the imposing teal doors, numbered 0001 to 0005 (2025), recalling the oxidized iron of prison corridors. Locked but not mute, they compel eye contact through their narrow openings—a gaze of confinement returned. Nearby, woven surfaces pixelate memory, their roughness paradoxically soothing, as if only by tracing the system’s jagged edges can one begin to imagine them worn smooth.

The Prison Windows (2025), numbered 1-5, were quieter but no less arresting. Painted sky-blue on their interior-facing side, flecked with clouds, they offered a fragile proposition: that freedom lies elsewhere, glimpsed but not attained. The choice to center a single artist can sometimes flatten a booth, but here it sharpened the gallery’s voice and clarified its commitment.

Craig, who endured solitary confinement himself, folds that history into forms that carry both weight and breath. Contrasting hues—carceral teal against celestial blue and orange, counterfeit green against lived brown—mark a practice at once grounded and transcendent. More than enjoyable, the booth was proof that risk, when tethered to vision, can resonate deeply.