“OUT AFTER DARK”: One of the works in artist Tamara Santibañez’s exhibition, on view through October 16 in the Hurley Gallery at the Lewis Arts complex on the Princeton University campus. (Photo by Jon Sweeney)
The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University now presents “Out After Dark,” an exhibition of new work by 2025-27 Princeton Arts Fellow Tamara Santibañez. The installation of multimedia works calls attention to the bodily negotiations we make to access space within shifting landscapes of law and power, speculating on how we might rethink and remake these tacit agreements.
The exhibition is on view in the Hurley Gallery at the Lewis Arts complex through October 16. It is free and open to the public daily from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. The gallery is an accessible venue.
The body here is referenced less through its visuality than by its presence moving through the exhibit, or the materiality of its encounter with the built environment. On display are the everyday materials that make up the borders of the constructed world, refabricated using alternative substances. Santibañez plays with the assumed durability and duration of various building sites and objects and alters their utility. Seemingly indestructible materials are rendered vulnerable — the bricks found here are made of glass and paper; the tough barrier of a leather jacket is made porous by a delicate glass etching lit up as if a window to elsewhere.
Writer of the exhibition text, Mich Ling, explains that the title “Out After Dark” references the words of a surviving Attica Correctional Facility “brother,” Carlos Roché, describing the historic 1971 prison rebellion. Roché quotes fellow rebellion survivor, Raymond White, who told him during their takeover of the prison and their establishment of an autonomous zone in Attica’s D Yard, “Man, I ain’t been out after dark in 22 years.” Ling notes that within the prison, looking at the stars after nightfall is a transgressive act made possible through the collective reorganization of carceral space into a shared commons. “Out After Dark” takes up this provocation, revealing that in different hands, a brick can be put to other uses.
Santibañez is an interdisciplinary artist and oral historian living and working in Brooklyn, N.Y. Santibañez’s work is rooted in storytelling and the visual language of identity construction, exploring subcultural semiotics, memory work, and the meanings made from bodily adornment.
As a Princeton arts fellow over the past two years, Santibañez has taught the undergraduate studio courses Flower Study: Uses and Misuses of Beauty and Corpus Archive: The Body As/Against the Record.
Visit arts.princeton.edu to learn more about the Program in Visual Arts, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.