Artist and educator Alison Cornyn will share what she has learned in her long-term research into the New York State Training School for Girls (1904-1975), the largest girls’ prison in the U.S. at the time. Girls throughout New York, including the jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, were sent to this institution over the 70 years it was open.

The resulting documentary art project, Incorrigibles, was born from the stories and lives of girls incarcerated there. The project collects and shares these stories using diverse components, including a traveling exhibition, short films, free public events, workshops, a website, and an artist book. Incorrigibles aims to reexamine and challenge the language and conceptions historically used to label, define, and confine girls.

In 2016, as part of the Mellon Foundation-funded project “Aging and its Tropes,” Cornyn presented some of that original research with photographs and diaries of some of the women who had been locked up at the NY State Training School for Girls. That project has grown and has received support from the NEH, Humanities New York, The Rubin Foundation, and other organizations. Cornyn has recently completed a new short documentary, Hilda O vs. New York State, with Heather Greer. Hilda, now 83 years old, was locked up at the reformatory in the 1950s at 15 years old. She is suing NY State for sexual abuse that she endured while she was there.

Cornyn will detail the project's trajectory, followed by a conversation with Neni Panourgiá.

Speakers

Alison Cornyn is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator whose work often incorporates public memory and archives. For over 20 years, Cornyn has initiated new forms of storytelling in installations and online, investigating pressing social issues from multiple perspectives. Many of her projects address the US criminal legal system and mass incarceration. Her current project, Incorrigibles, examines youth justice for girls in New York – past and present. Incorrigibles investigates the long-term use of stigmatizing language to define and confine young women and tells the stories of women who were incarcerated in their youth to create an archive of first-person testimonies that counter and broaden institutional histories. Her work has received numerous awards, including a Creative Capital award for her pioneering interactive documentary about US prisons, a Peabody Award, the Gracie Allen for Women in Media Award, and Pew’s Batten Award for Innovation. She serves on the Board of the NYC Municipal Archives and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in NYC.

Neni Panourgiá is an Affiliated Faculty in the Program in Hellenic Studies. She is an anthropologist, Associate Professor at the Prison Education Program, Psychology Department, and Academic Adviser at the Justice in Education Initiative at Columbia University. She is the incoming editor (with Katrina Thompson) of Anthropology and Humanism. Her essays on anthropology, ethnography, critical theory, art and architecture, critical medical studies, and politics can be found in Mousse, Documenta, American Ethnologist, Ethos, Anthropological Quarterly, angelaki, and many edited volumes.

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