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Exhibits :: 2006 Season ESP :: Home
 
Historic Exhibits Art Installations

Historic Exhibits

"Voices of Eastern State" Audio Tour

With this state–of–the–art audio tour, the long-abandoned cellblocks come alive with the sounds of daily life inside the ancient prison.

Catwalk

"If Reform is Possible...
          ...It Will Happen Here"
The Worldwide Influence of the Eastern State Penitentiary

When the Eastern State Penitentiary opened on October 25, 1829 it was the world's most expensive and high-tech prison. This massive institution loomed over Philadelphia on a lonely hilltop. Its design unified the world's most advanced building technology with a radical new system of prisoner isolation.

The new prison caused a worldwide phenomenon. As governments began to copy the new prison, Eastern State Penitentiary became the most influential prison ever built.
If Reform is Possible...

Art Installations

2010 Guidelines for Artists’ Proposals and links to the art resources page

Linda Brenner: Ghost Cats

Thirty-nine sculptures represent the colony of cats that took up residence in the prison grounds after the penitentiary closed in 1971.
audio : meet the artist
Brenner Installation
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William Cromar: GTMO

A materially and dimensionally accurate representation of one cell from the now abandoned Camp X-Ray at GTMO (military abbreviation for the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) is inserted inside of a now-abandoned Eastern State Penitentiary cell.
audio : meet the artist
William Cromar
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Susan Hagen: Recollection Tableaux

A series of miniature dioramas in Cellblock 7 show - accurately and poetically - the daily lives of prisoners at Eastern State throughout its history.

audio : meet the artist
Hagan's 'Shoemakers'
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Alexa Hoyer: I always wanted to go to Paris, France

Using three televisions to screen excerpts from over seven decades of prison film history, this installation challenges visitors to re-examine their notion of prison life.
audio : meet the artist
Hoyer sketch
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Johanna Inman and Anna Norton: Living Space

This series of five videos of time-lapse photographs featuring the subtle changes in light and weather that occur at Eastern State Penitentiary. The locations chosen for the videos represent areas and architectural features common to the site, each with distinctive characteristics created by the structure itself as well as the effects of time.

audio : meet the artist
Inman and Norton
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Matthew and Jonathan Stemler: Juxtaposition

This installation gives new life to fallen material by dividing the cell horizontally with suspended plaster pieces. It provides an area in which to consider the building’s past and present experience in light of material position.
audio : meet the artist
Installation
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Judy Taylor: my glass house

Black and white, glass-plate photographs showing specimens of the natural habitat found within Eastern State's walls replace missing windowpanes in the penitentiary greenhouse.
audio : meet the artist
Taylor image

Artist installations are supported by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency, through the Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts (PPA), its regional arts funding partnership. State government funding comes through an annual appropriation by Pennsylvania's General Assembly and from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. PPA is administered in this region by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.

Arts programming is also made possible with funding from Eastern State's Halloween Fundraiser, Terror Behind the Walls.

 

Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, Inc.