A massive interactive exhibit full of immersive story-based experiences…
15 art billboards and banners across the Twin Cities…
Daily free programming, events, and workshops…
End Youth Prisons MN, Performing Statistics, The Legal Rights Center, youth leaders in the Twin Cities, and artists from across North America are collaborating to create a series of interactive exhibits and public artworks that use new technology to imagine a more just, whole, and safe future.
Featuring a city-wide constellation of massive banners, billboards, temporary murals, immersive exhibitions, and robust public programming, this rare project looks to local and national youth leaders to help guide us all to a future where all children are free, healed, and thriving.
Organized by The Legal Rights Center, Performing Statistics, and End Youth Prisons MN, this immersive exhibition takes viewers on an interactive journey from the history of youth incarceration to the present-day impact on youth and their families and ends in a future world where all youth are free. The exhibition is filled with virtual reality, interactive art installations, and eight years of art made in collaboration with youth leaders nationwide.
Local youth leaders have spent months working to create art that teaches viewers about the history and the present state of youth surveillance, criminalization and incarceration in Minnesota, and visionary garments they’ll wear as they race us towards a future where all youth are free!
Can art create a map towards a more free future? Freedom Constellations looks to youth leaders to guide us toward that vision.
With over 15 youth leaders and an array of community partners, the project uses art to create a blueprint for a more just world. Using their portraits and poetry, youth-leaders co-designed these billboards with an incredible group of local and national artists. Each billboard represents a theme that youth leaders identified as a building block toward a future where all youth are free, safe, and healed.
Downtown Minneapolis
North Minneapolis
Northeast Minneapolis
South Minneapolis
Saint Paul
The #NoKidsInPrison exhibition comes alive with augmented reality animations. The project showcases how the newest forms of interactive technology can transform public art and public spaces into megaphones for those whose voices need to be heard.
The Animation: Youth leaders from the Juvenile Law Center, YASP, Care Not Control, and Mural Arts Philadelphia’s Restorative Justice Guild program wrote hundreds of lines of poetry that imagined a more free and safe future. They then edited the poem down and created paper cuts and other ways to illustrate the future world their poetry imagined. The Invisible Thread team then took their art, portraits, and animation direction and transformed it into the augmented reality animation you can see on giant banners across the city.
Credits: Invisible Thread and Performing Statistics in collaboration with Qilla, Tiguida, Rodney, Jared, Duane, Tasheema, and Jah. Augmented Reality workshops were facilitated by Mark Strandquist and Kate DeCiccio with support from Katie Kaplan. Portraits and audio by Mark Strandquist.
Thank you to the artists who made this project possible!
Want one of the billboard designed for your home, classroom, office or community space? Come to the #NoKidsInPrison exhibit and grab free posters from our take-action section!
Performing Statistics in collaboration with End Youth Prisons MN, the Legal Rights Center, Black Youth Healing Arts Center, and Springboard for the Arts.
Project Managers / Lead Artists: Kate DeCiccio and Mark Strandquist
Production Manager for Freedom Constellations MN: Con Rice
Special thanks to Legal Rights Center + End Youth Prisons MN youth leaders!
Funders: Art for Justice, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Kresge Foundation, Public Welfare Foudnation
