BROOKLYN, NY.- In 2019, while living in New York's Hudson Valley, artist Maggie Hazen had a chance encounter with a corrections administrator from the New York State Department of Juvenile Justice, who was purchasing Hazen’s bike from a Craigslist ad. The administrator was interested in her art practice and invited her to share it with the Columbia Secure Center for Girls: a maximum-security juvenile prison facility operated and managed by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, right up the street from where Hazen lived at the time.

In 2021, Hazen, along with artists Marshmallow, Jay, and Juste-A, founded the Columbia Collective, as a group of emerging justice-impacted artists building a collective imaginary across states of confinement, named for the Secure Center in which they lived and worked. The group met weekly, often for whole days at a time due to a lack of facility programming, using an open studio model which focused on cultivating open paths of making without assignments or parameters. Every artist who entered the facility had the opportunity to participate as part of the Collective. In early 2022, two new Collective members joined the group: Marilynn, who had been released from the Columbia Secure Center in 2020, and Rory Rei, who had known Marilynn from her foster care placement at the Randolph Children’s Home in East Randolph, New York.

The exhibition Fraught Imaginaries is a collaborative and coded presentation of Hazen’s most recent body of sculptural work, made while investigating the material and metaphorical structures of the Columbia Secure Center, and works from the Columbia Collective spanning across physical and digital media. This body of work has been developing since 2019, when Hazen and the Columbia Collective’s work first began. The title Fraught Imaginaries refers to Dr. Nicole Fleetwood’s concept of the same name, used to “consider the complex dynamics and power structures that shape artistic collaborations between non-incarcerated professional artists, nonprofit arts organizations, and incarcerated artists, students, and participants. It is meant to gesture at the possibilities and challenges of collective dreaming and art-making by people who are differently situated across carceral geographies.” (1)

Hazen’s body of work Fraught Imaginaries transfigures the architectures of the Columbia Secure Center, as well as the visual lexicons of privatized, third-party suppliers of commissary goods, which include food, clothing, hygiene items, and more, ordered from catalogs that supply mail-order and online packages to state prisons across the U.S. Seen through frameworks of magical realism, fantasy, and game theory, Hazen’s transformations of these items highlights the absurd and extractive nature of the prison industrial supply chain writ large, while also attempting to warp or dissolve it. The Columbia Collective artists likewise record and augment their spaces. Gate clearances and security checks for art supplies necessitate creative navigation of material limitations. As a result, works emphasize drawing, painting on canvas, mixed-media on wood panel, and paper-based constructions, as well as digital support from Hazen. The work of the Collective functions through sight, symbols, and signifiers of internal and external vision, imagined spaces as well as lived realities.

Inspired by the radical experimentation and play experienced at the Secure Center, Hazen’s ability to move materials and messages in and out of the system is exemplified by the many thresholds—physical, psychic, and emotional—represented in the exhibition. Employing various processes of material layering and incorporation of relevant architectures, objects, and materials, Fraught Imaginaries creates a window into the material ecosystem of the Secure Center, moving through portals of reality into a melted, cartooned, and disintegrated system.

The exhibition at Transmitter also marks the launch of the handmade and riso-printed coloring book Fraught Imaginaries, featuring contributed texts and line drawings by members of the Columbia Collective on tear-out pages, tracing the trajectory of the project. The Fraught Imaginaries coloring book, printed by Shandaken Projects, is available for purchase at Transmitter. All proceeds from book and artwork sales go directly to the artists.

The Columbia Collective is a group of emerging, female/trans, incarcerated/formerly incarcerated artists building a collective imagining across states of confinement. The group is named after the Columbia Secure Center, the maximum-security juvenile detention center in which the founding members of the Collective lived and worked. We build our imagining under the names Jay, Juste-A, Marilynn, Marshmallow, and Rory Rei, in collaboration with artist Maggie Hazen and writer Sofia Thiệu D’Amico.

Since the formation of the Columbia Collective, the group has exhibited and collaborated with Pioneer Works, Red Hook, NY; Moxi, The Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation, Santa Barbara, CA; Fierman Gallery, New York, NY; Siena College, Loudonville, NY; Border Patrol, Bakersfield, CA; Shandaken Projects, Catskill, NY; The Athens Cultural Center, Athens, NY; Foreland Contemporary Arts Campus, Catskill, NY; and Girls Inc., Santa Barbara, CA.

Jay (he/him, b. 2006) is a visual artist. He used to live in Syracuse, New York. Until 2023 he lived at Brookwood Secure Center for Youth, whatever that’s supposed to be. Even though he lived there, it wasn’t his home. He doesn’t have one. He’s been through some struggles, everyone has at some point, and he expresses how he feels about those struggles by pouring it out onto paper.

Juste-A (she/her, b. 2003) is a visual artist and writer. She was born and raised in the Bronx where she lived for sixteen years. Growing up, Juste-A thought life was going to be rainbows and unicorns, but then it wasn’t. Now Juste-A has been through a lot and can see what reality is. She is learning who she is and trying to find her voice. She is currently incarcerated at the New York Taconic Correctional Facility serving an eight-year sentence. Being in jail does not give Juste-A an opportunity to find herself. She has no one to confide in, so she writes.

Marilynn (she/her, b. 2004) is a visual artist from Jamestown, New York. She was first placed into the system at the age of thirteen, and remained there for about three years. She’s been to a lot of different juvenile detention facilities. The system has taught her so much, but so little at the same time. She enjoys drawing, painting, and reading, which gets her through most of her many rainy days. She aspires to help those who have gone through situations similar to her own. In 2024, Marilynn published She/Rose, her first collection of poetry, in collaboration with Border Patrol and the Columbia Collective. She is now the mother to a baby boy.

Marshmallow (she/her, b. 2002) is a visual artist from Gowanda, New York. She was confined to the Columbia Secure and Brookwood Secure Centers for four years. When she makes art, her imagination floats away from reality. Her art represents her dreams and nightmares. This art represents her. She is now a mother to a beautiful eight-month-old daughter.

Rory Rei (she/her, b. 2003) is a visual artist. Born in a refugee camp in Thailand, she came to the United States with her family hoping for a better life. However, things weren’t what they seemed. A couple of years later she was put into the foster care system. Since then she has aged out and is living on her own in Fredonia, New York with her fiancé and friend.

Maggie Hazen (she/her, b. 1989) is an LA and NY-based visual artist working between collage, sculpture and experimental digital media. Her work has been exhibited, screened, and performed at the Bronx Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Tolerance, CICA Museum, South Korea, Granoff Center at Brown University, Pulse Miami Beach as part of Pulse Play, The Boston Young Contemporaries exhibition, and the Center for Photography at the University of California Riverside as part of Southern California’s Pacific Standard Time; among others. Public works include Hidden in Plein Site, a billboard about carceral landscapes in the Catskill Mountains, Transmimic, a projection on the Manhattan Bridge, and Of Departed Delineations, a transformative memory commemorating the 1992 LA Riots. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at venues throughout the United States and internationally, including New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, and Philadelphia.

Hazen has had fellowships, grants, and residencies from Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; AIM Fellowship at the Bronx Museum, Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Center, New York State Council on the Arts/Wave Farm; Lighthouse Works Visual Artist Fellowship; Vermont Studio Center and the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Switzerland; and many others. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, NYU, The Stevens Institute of Technology, The Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, and as part of the Bard College Clemente courses in the humanities. She is a visiting artist-in-residence at Bard College in the Studio Arts program. She has studied at Brown University, MIT, and the European Graduate School. She holds a BFA from Biola University in California and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

(1) Nicole R. Fleetwood, “Fraught Imaginaries: Collaborative Art in Prison.” Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (2020): 158.