1Introduction

On January 25, 2024, Alabama became the first state to execute a human being using nitrogen gas. This untested method had been rejected by the American Veterinary Medical Association for animal euthanasia and received condemnation from the United Nations for violating an international treaty that “bans torture and other cruel, inhumane, or degrading punishment.”¹ Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, “Revisionist History,” the story of Kenny Smith has been recently amplified in popular culture. Smith was sentenced to life in prison by an 11–1 jury vote that was overridden by a judge—a practice that is now illegal in Alabama. What is more, Kenny was already an execution survivor: In November 2022, the state tried to execute him via lethal injection but failed to find a suitable vein before the death warrant expired at midnight. The process was so harrowing that the state paused executions for three months afterward to review its protocol.² Smith had been incarcerated since 1989 and on death row since 1996 after being sentenced for a murder-for-hire in which he participated at age twenty-two. His drawing, My View of the World, provides a glimpse into the perspective that had shaped his existence for the last three and a half decades.

The U.S. South leads the nation in executions: According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the region is responsible for 1,367 of the 1,670 executions in the modern era of the death penalty to date.³ In particular, Alabama executes the greatest number of people per capita. As death row resident Bart Johnson editorializes, Alabama is “unrelenting in its pursuit of the death penalty.”⁴ Official records, however, obscure the state’s role in executions by hiding important information, such as execution protocol and the impact of executions on the physical body. The protocol for Kenny Smith’s execution via nitrogen gas, which only came to light during the litigation preceding the execution, remains heavily redacted to the public.⁵ The identities of execution workers and product manufacturers are also anonymized. Consequently, activist organizations such as Death Penalty Action are demanding that Alabama “pull back the curtain” and expose the secrecy surrounding the state’s methods and protocols.⁶

Smith’s case is a devastating microcosm for the U.S. South’s dedication to corporal punishment through methods of concealment. It also demonstrates how documentation and art can become vehicles for illumination and resistance. Documentary art creates the potential to engage the public with the topic of state executions through visual representations—such as My View of the World—that center the perspective of those directly impacted. This essay explores the development of the Alabama Death Row Archive at the University of North Alabama as well as the transformation of these materials into a traveling art installation project called The Art of Resistance: Documenting Alabama’s Death Row. Here, we give you a glimpse into our process and the exhibit’s reception; a more robust description of the archival documents and the exhibit itself appears in our full essay in Record, Document, Archive: Constructing the South Out of Region. This collaborative project, which also involved Black Alabama-based artists Keana Brewster and Alik Key, as well as artists currently on Alabama’s death row, became a model for relationship-building and community dialogue designed in opposition to the isolation and social death enacted by capital punishment. It also blurred our roles in productive ways: As the project’s researcher and co-facilitator, Katie contributed several art pieces to the installation based on primary sources and secondary data, and as the project’s lead artist and co-facilitator, Kerrigan increasingly involved herself in the research that supported the project. Creating The Art of Resistance allowed us to explore the permeability of the boundaries between art and documentation.

2The Alabama Death Row Archive

The mission of the Alabama Death Row Archive at the University of North Alabama, established in 2019, is to collect and preserve documents related to the policy and practice of capital punishment. The first donations came from Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty (PHADP), the nation’s only 501(c)3 nonprofit founded and run by people on Alabama’s death row. It included art submissions from a collaborative exhibit we designed for a library program at the University of North Alabama, as well as the organization’s founding documents: its articles of incorporation, photographs of its early members, and its first issues of a newsletter called On Wings of Hope, created and formatted at Holman Prison on a typewriter before circulation. The newsletters, which form the bulk of the archive, chronicle the history of the organization and its advocacy efforts over and against the ever-changing and ever-expanding policy and practice of capital punishment in Alabama. In 2023, Katie Owens-Murphy worked with PHADP to publish a curated collection of the newsletters called Ghosts over the Boiler: Voices from Alabama’s Death Row. The archive supplies important counternarratives to the state’s dominant narrative about the death penalty. Above all, it challenges the state’s insistence on the inhumanity and incorrigibility of those on death row.

While the digital archive and book capture these and other counternarratives, their visibility and capacity to engage the public remains limited. Owens-Murphy reached out to community-based artist Kerrigan Casey and asked her to help transform the Alabama Death Row Archive into an immersive art installation project, with primary documents serving as an orientation guide for participating outside artists and as an ongoing teaching tool for the general public. This collaborative project repurposes and transforms audio and visual documents from the archive and book into a mixed-media art exhibit that will travel to various locations across the state. Archival documents such as legal documents, autopsy reports, clemency petitions, and audio interviews are incorporated into portraits, sculptures, and immersive installations that compel the public to experience death row through the perspectives of those directly impacted. What is more, the exhibit expands the archive to include creative work, including material by artists currently on Alabama’s death row that highlights the resistance and resilience of those facing execution.

3Developing The Art of Resistance

We met biweekly with the other artists to advance the project and set up meetings with family members who had lost loved ones to the death penalty in Alabama. We also used these meetings to set guidelines for the project. Our community agreement included using people-first language so as not to replicate the labels of the criminal-legal system. We also agreed that the exhibit would not focus on the crime of which people on death row had been convicted, as media stories had already publicized these crimes in detail. Rather, our role was to provide counternarratives that acknowledge that “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done,” as Bryan Stevenson famously wrote in Just Mercy (2014). We decided to reset the narrative to model the change and behaviors that we wanted to see in the world.

After getting to know each other and familiarizing ourselves with the information from the archive and the book, we began our correspondence with the people currently residing on Alabama’s death row. We acquired a list of participants who wanted to contribute to the exhibition. Each outside artist (Keana Brewster, Alik Key, and Kerrigan Casey) was then paired with roughly three artists on death row to brainstorm ideas for creating a physical representation to include in the exhibit. Through our correspondence, we connected with multidisciplinary artists who not only sent physical artwork but also contributed poems to the exhibition.

Much of the exhibit’s art—including a pair of frothy lungs Kerrigan created to demonstrate the pulmonary edema revealed in autopsy reports of people who were executed via lethal injection—is designed to look ugly, gruesome, discomforting, and messy. The paintings contain expressive layers of acrylic drippings. The art-making process for this project was an opportunity to practice with elements of art, such as shape, texture, form, space, color, and value. Focusing on these elements provided clarity on how we would speak through our content.

We also understood the risks required in balancing difficult feelings in a single exhibit. We aimed to capture an experience that critiques the current system and creates dialogue for healing. Creating visual concepts from archival information was challenging. The art-making process, however, fueled our passion as we confronted policy through the intimacy and immediacy of art. It also revealed many truths about systemic injustice and racial disparities in the criminal legal system. Throughout the art-making process, we read, listened to, watched, and absorbed archival information to connect with our subject. This oftentimes felt incredibly triggering, particularly for the project’s Black artists, but we all also understood how transformative our work could be as a platform for social change. Developing a strong stance and combining art and activism was a shared experience of the art-making process. As we completed this collaborative project, we were better able to appreciate how deeply connected we are to each other and how artists, researchers, and activists can work together toward social change.

4Installation and Reception

In order to structurally center our themes of resistance and self-advocacy, we decided to organize the exhibit around the primary modes of resistance that people on death row have utilized. Our blueprint for the exhibit is designed to guide peoples’ experience from immediate to more structural approaches to challenging capital punishment. Consequently, we divided the exhibit into three segments: clemency, reversal, and advocacy.

So far, we have installed the exhibit in four locations in Alabama: two installations in art galleries and two pop-up installations in churches. We use a rental van to transport the materials to and from our partner sites.

At each site, we have hosted a dialogue around the exhibit and its themes. At the art galleries, we delivered artist talks, such as this event at Lowe Mill Arts & Entertainment in Huntsville, Alabama:

At the churches, we facilitated discussions before Sunday services, and we were even invited to deliver the main talk during the service at the Unitarian Universalist church. We also enlisted congregation members to assist us with installing the work. We wanted to engage communities in this work from the beginning all the way through the end.

Here is a video from the installation at the Grace Presbyterian Church in Tuscaloosa, Alabama:

We placed a box at the end of the exhibit and invited participants to submit questions that the art pieces raised for them. Some of the questions—“What about the victims?”—revealed a certain resistance to engaging with The Art of Resistance. Most of the questions, however, expressed curiosity, compassion, and concern: “Why do we punish killing with more killing?”

We hope to incorporate these questions into future iterations of the installation, and we would love to hear yours, as well. Hit us up at art.of.resistance.alabama@gmail.com.