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Kenneth Webb, Blood in the Soil (2023). Oil on canvas, 35.5 × 39.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Huma Gallery. Photo: Ruben Diaz.
Abolition interrogates the systems currently in place. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney conjure “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”1 Prisons in the United States are a byproduct of values instilled by a government built upon slavery, greed, exploitation, and policing. But abolitionism asserts that our punitive system is just a forced narrative. Abolition requires more than eliminating physical spaces; it introduces community, mutual aid, and acceptance. Recreating society first requires confronting old habits and ways of thinking. In multidisciplinary artist Kenneth Webb’s Hymns From the Cave, recently on view at Huma Gallery, the L.A. native documented the internal and external journey of escaping one’s habitual shadows.
Previously serving a prison sentence of 50 years-to-life, Webb expedited his case by maneuvering through complex semantics of the legal system that had worked against him.2 During his incarceration, he co-organized a dance class at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) that challenged participants to embody their emotions with vulnerable choreography. When he wasn’t in dance classes, he painted. In Hymns From the Cave, the two genres of his artistic practice collided. Throughout the exhibition, Webb’s work insists that the show (and prison industrial complex) is not just about him; it involves all of us.
In the center of the gallery, the installation Sketchbooks on Granny’s Couch (2025) included a floral couch and large stack of papers atop a rug and a side table with its door ajar. The work welcomed viewers into a safe and cozy home. However, a closer look revealed the stack of papers to be Webb’s court documents stacked up high. Soil seeped out of the side table. Portions of the couch were covered in painted phrases that gave viewers insights into Webb’s process. One phrase on the back left corner of the couch was notable: “I daydream a lot. I pluck my images from this ‘dreamland’ a place of fiction and I visit this place often. However, when my art is extracted from that place and crafted into the physical realm, is it still considered fictional? NO! It’s post-fiction.”After the opening, Webb told me that he describes fiction as the lie we all agree to. “Post- fiction” is the practice of agency over one’s own narrative. This is what drives Webb’s practice.
In addition to the installation, 13 paintings lined the walls of the gallery, about half of which were created in a California state prison. Webb’s approach to story-telling through these works is aesthetically diverse—realism, cartoon, color field. Blood in the Soil (2023) addresses the killing of innocent Black men with realism. The painting depicts a Black man lying in a cotton field with an arrow shot through his hand. The man’s right hand lays at a 90-degree angle to his side with his left over his heart. The stance is particularly reminiscent of the one we hold when reciting the pledge of allegiance or being sworn into court. It tells the story of a man who has followed the rules and pledged to the U.S., only for its history and government to then cause him perilous harm. By pairing imagery of cotton with a weapon shot through the body, Webb fights a discriminatory fiction. Webb’s post-fiction theme surfaces by exposing the truth behind this normative system.
The abstract I Painted a Mirror Black (2020) differs stylistically from the surrounding works, a color field meditatively filled with shades of black. Created following George Floyd’s murder, the piece suggests a direct confrontation with Blackness and its meaning for the viewer. Is it a community? Is it worth attacking? Is it simply a color?
On the back wall hung a single vibrant painting called Finally Free / Heavy is the Head (2024). It depicts a mountainous landscape viewed through a broken fence. On the other side of the fence, a small naked man stands atop a rock with his hands out wide. In the foreground, CDCR attire is tossed on the ground, suggesting the figure stripped the prisoner uniform from his body before running to take this victorious stance. Finally Free / Heavy is the Head marks Webb’s destination: post-fiction. He has stripped the narratives that have dictated his worth. He is naked. He is free.
At the exhibition’s opening, Webb’s performance began with a reading from his journal: “I feel like I’ve died multiple times.” Webb sat on the floral couch alongside his mother and auntie. As his mother sang hymns from his childhood in the Baptist church, Webb gravitated to the stack of his court proceedings. He slammed his hand on it and the audience cheered, Finally Free / Heavy is the Head visible over his shoulder. Webb grabbed a few pages from the stack, approached a shredder hanging from the ceiling like a light fixture, and fed it pages. As the shreds rained to the ground, more people cheered. Webb concluded the performance by inviting audience members to shred pages themselves. Family, friends, strangers, elders and children all partook. It was a party. This was the freedom Webb imagined in the final painting of the exhibition.
The prison industrial complex is as inconspicuous as our furniture or the way we experience a color. Webb challenges our complicity in its fiction—by grappling with the truth in his paintings and channeling joy in his movement.