Shut It Down: A Decade of Art and Resistance by Creative Justice

10 years ago, out of the No New Youth Jail movement, Creative Justice was created to bring together professional mentor artists and youth participants to examine the root causes of incarceration and other oppressive systems, making art that helps us understand our circumstances. In line with proven healing strategies, this community was designed to celebrate, collaborate, comfort and inspire. By layering nurturing acts like these with a cultural framework that arms young artists with the skills and insight to tear apart the structures of racism and other injustices, we can begin to rebuild community in a way that supports everyone’s wholeness.

Creative Justice is an art program, but it is also a movement for healing and justice. Both art and movement-building are born of imagination: they are about exploring the possibilities that we create as individuals and as members of a collective. About seeing where we are and where we want to go. In doing so, they articulate the power and potential of our communities.

Shut It Down is a retrospective of some of CJ’s favorite works of art from its first decade. In these photos, paintings and other works, the young artists of creative justice respond to issues that matter to them and impact their lives. Shut It Down includes works first shown at Gallery 4Culture, Anne Focke Gallery, MOHAI, Hedreen Art Gallery, City Hall, Seattle Public Library and UW Law School. They capture and document the determination, the weariness, the hope and the joy in our youth as they fight to survive and thrive in the face of obstacles actively working for their demise.

Shut It Down is being presented as part of Creative Justice’s 10-Year Celebration of Care and Restoration.