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Jailbirds was an exhibition featuring new and recent work by Gilberto Rivera (2022 Center Fellow), whose practice is deeply shaped by his two decades of incarceration and the ongoing realities of subjugation that continue to shape communities beyond prison walls. Rivera’s work explores the psychological effects of solitary confinement, the entanglements of the U.S. criminal legal and immigration systems and the broader legacies of colonialism and exploitation embedded within the prison industrial complex. This will be the second exhibition and first solo presentation at the Center’s flagship location that opened in March 2025 as well as Rivera’s first ever solo presentation.

Rivera’s art is grounded in the formal possibilities and symbolic languages that lay at the heart of everyday material culture, from magazines and newspapers to textiles and traditional art materials. The found imagery and discarded objects he reanimates within his compositions are simultaneously layered with singular and collective significance, equally informed by the restrictions and subjugation of incarceration and both the historical struggles by Puerto Rican activists for justice and liberation as well as the contemporary diasporic ramifications. The movement from the personal to the political—from the individual to the social and back again—is a consistent element in Rivera’s work, one that steadily reveals how both are fundamentally intertwined. Through his construction of space and collaging of materials, Rivera creates new sensibilities and emergent meanings that often collapse the distinction between fine art and mass culture, a process the artist considers essential to the democratization of art and its making. This process also recalls the improvised wall collages of photographs and magazine clippings that circulate through prison cells, where fragments of mass media become tools for survival, imagination and the assertion of personal identity within a space designed for erasure. During his incarceration, Rivera formed an art collective with artists Jesse Krimes and Jared Owens, with whom he was incarcerated alongside.

In his Jailbird paintings, Rivera examines the social assumptions that often follow formerly incarcerated individuals, while also considering how different communities respond to the effects of the prison industrial complex. In each of his paintings Rivera reimagines the interior of a prison cell with crisp architectural lines and precise proportions, details informed by his background in construction. Instead of creating a stereotypically gray and drab space, Rivera describes these interiors as visually imaginative worlds, replete with text and layered images that would have been sourced from printed media and which he transforms through collage. The overlapping references to current events, popular culture and facets of the carceral experience reflect the way that our experience of reality—fragmented and partial—is always constructed and contextual just as we work to alter and adjust it.

At the center of each painting Rivera places a different bird or group of birds that introduce the idea of recidivism, or the expectation that formerly incarcerated people will eventually be incarcerated again. The birds also suggest the cyclical process of migration and by doing so they invoke the concept of the ‘jailbird’ with a special inflection, specifically the way people are made to move in and out of carceral institutions. Rather than allow this reductive assumption to limit the expressive potential of the paintings and the imagined yet absent subject they imply, Rivera creates spaces of kaleidoscopic color where image and text collide with one another to produce new meanings altogether.

Though each painting presents a vivid and distinct form of subjectivity and psychology, Rivera also uses their symbolic references to critique the federal prison system—as in a work that addresses the ongoing struggle to close Rikers Island—and comment upon the experiences of those being subjugated by it—as in another painting that reflects upon the growing number of women being incarcerated in the United States. In these works, his process of collaging media images that depict systems of oppression gives rise to environments where the birds seem at once to emerge from and vanish into their surroundings, underscoring how the system is designed for people to fail. In their captivity, the birds reflect the act of caging and confinement so central to carceral institutions, thereby both classifying and refuting their nature.

Jailbirds will also include a series of works on paper that further highlight Rivera’s interest in exploring abstraction as a form of liberation with an architectural sensibility. With compositions at once loose and freeform, at others solid and structural, Rivera infuses these spaces with saturated color and dramatic mark making, creating intimately scaled works that tie back to the artist’s earlier use of graffiti and provide a bridge to the conceptual rigor of the Jailbird paintings. Evoking different episodes from the history of abstract painting, his works on paper are dynamic and spacious, elegantly constructed and intricately finished. As in his paintings, Rivera affirms the redemptive and liberatory potential of art as a means for altering the world around us.