High Walls: Artists Navigate Structures of Confinement

Exploring how physical and imagined space shapes the carceral system in Colorado and beyond.

August 15-October 12, 2025

Opening reception: Friday, August 15, 6-9pm

About High Walls

Curated by Katja Rivera, Sarah McKenzie, Geoffrey Shamos, and Tya Alisa Anthony

The US leads the world in incarceration rates, with significant racial and class disparities. Colorado alone incarcerates about 614 per 100,000 people in its prisons, jails, immigration detention centers, and juvenile justice facilities. 

High Walls will present work by artists engaging with or responding to the built environment, systems of surveillance, and the power of imagined space in relationship to the carceral system. 

High Walls emerges from a national conversation around mass incarceration and the US criminal-legal system, with the intent of bringing this critical and long-overdue conversation to Colorado. The exhibition features works by both currently incarcerated and nationally recognized artists.

High Walls asks how space–the built environment, surveillance technologies, and imagined space–shapes the carceral system and how art becomes a conduit for introspection and ambitions that expand beyond the high walls of the institution. 

The exhibition will highlight the work of several artists who are currently or were formerly incarcerated in the Colorado Department of Corrections, including Cedar Annenkovna, Sean Marshall, and Dustin Ware. 

Their artwork will be presented in conversation with projects by notable contemporary artists from outside Colorado, including a five-channel sound and video installation by Maria Gaspar and photography by Sara Bennett. Other projects and engagements will speak directly to our region, including a mural workshop with system-impacted youth, led by Chicano-activist and artist Emanuel Martinez, who has worked with young people to create murals throughout the country.

Our curatorial team is developing this project in consultation and collaboration with an expanding list of local organizations doing work and advocacy in the field, including: Impact Arts, Unbound Authors, ACT Ensemble, Unchained Voices, Mirror Image Arts, Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, the Emanuel Project, and Colorado Radio for Justice. The aim is to connect local conversations and issues with a national network of thinkers, advocates, and artists. 

Participating Artists

Cedar Annenkovna

Sara Bennett

Hector Castillo

Jeffrey Dominguez

Maria Gaspar

Lynell Hill

Riccardo Kirven

Sonny Lee

Douglas DC Lehman

Sean Marshall

Emanuel Martinez

Joseph Taylor McGill

Justin Moore

Molly Ott

Mario Rios

Dustin Ware

Unchained Voices

Meet the Curators

Katja Rivera

Katja Rivera is the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Fine Arts Center at Colorado College (FAC). Recently curated exhibitions include Hương Ngô: Ungrafting (2024) and Ronny Quevedo: at the line (2021). She has also worked with artists such as Senga Nengudi, Na Mira, and Cy X to present their work at the FAC. Previously, Katja served as the Assistant Curator at Logan Center Exhibitions at the University of Chicago and as Research Associate for the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. With a dedication to research-based artistic practice, she is motivated by movement, translation, and fragmentation in contemporary art, and is especially interested in how histories of the Americas manifest in the present.

Tya Alisa Anthony

Tya Alisa Anthony, Interdisciplinary Artist + Curator, explores themes of social justice, human rights and identity. Anthony incorporates photography, collage, and sculpture to give a voice to narratives of often marginalized people as well as the social, economic, and natural environments that surround them. She’s interested in reimagining histories, and in creating autonomous spaces for bodies of color.

Tya received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree, (SUMMA CUM LAUDE) honored as Valedictorian, from Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design. She lives and works in the city of Denver, producing performance, photography + installations. Anthony is the Founder of Mahogany Vu Contemporary Art, an online thriving gallery for BIPOC artists, and a member of the advisory committee for the Colorado Photographic Arts Center.

Tya is a RedLine Residency Artist Alumni and serves on the Advisory Board for Leon Gallery, a non-profit gallery and creative space dedicated to mentoring emerging artists across multiple disciplines. She has served as a board member for Tilt West and artist representative for Platteforum. Prior to joining RedLine, she worked as the Student Diversity Equity and Inclusion Coordinator for Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.

Sarah McKenzie

Sarah McKenzie (sarahmckenzie.com) is a visual artist based in Boulder, Colorado. Her paintings document our built landscape, exploring changes in our architecture (what we build) for evidence of societal, economic, and cultural shifts (why we build). She is particularly interested in the dynamics of institutional space, as manifested in American museums and prisons. Sarah has exhibited her paintings nationally, including shows with the Walker Art Center, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Yale School of Architecture, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, among other venues. In 2021, she was awarded the Marion International Fellowship for the Visual and Performing Arts to support her research on the architecture of prisons. That same year, she also began teaching art classes inside the Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC) through the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative. In 2024, along with Lillian Stannard, Sarah co-founded Impact Arts (impactartsco.org) to continue her teaching in the CDOC and to create and support exhibition opportunities for artists impacted by the system.

Geoffrey Shamos

Geoffrey Shamos is the Director of the Vicki Myhren Gallery and Curator of the University Art Collections at the University of Denver. He holds degrees from Yale University and a PhD in art history from the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized in Northern Renaissance art. Geoffrey has curated numerous exhibitions across a wide range of historical and contemporary topics, including collaborative projects with the Prison Arts Initiative at the University of Denver. Prior to his current role, he worked at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Cantor Center for Visual Art at Stanford University, and RedLine Contemporary Art Center in Denver. At DU, Geoffrey is committed to creating meaningful connections through exhibitions and public programs that engage students, faculty, artists, and the broader community.

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