"These collages are maps of prisons... Prisons, and their waiting rooms, are dramatic, emotional, chaotic, and familial. They are strikingly Black, brown, and homosocial."

Anna Martine Whitehead does performance from the homelands of the Council of the Three Fires, among others. They make art and write about race, gender, and moving bodies; and support coalition movements committed to repair and transformation.

[i have so many dreams about prisons]

[Rosa’s mom worked at the jail]

I have so many dreams about prisons.

Long winding road, forest. It thins out and then you realize you’re there and
there’s these Black men tending the landscape. Like, OK, this is the most obvious.

Or long highways through almond orchards. Beautiful flowers. Trump signs,
signs that say Dust Bowl by Gavin Newsom. Signs about the prison’s values: An
honest place to work. To be welcomed this way, into a death trap.

There’s never many social visitors.

San Quentin is its own city. Nice houses, a post office, the pri son. One main road
that dead ends at the prison. You can turn off toward the hills or the water…
Beautiful views.
Sometimes egrets.
Paddle boarding.
You can hear seagulls.

The collages and texts featured in A Mouth Holds Many Things are ancillary to a larger multimedia + performance project by Anna Martine Whitehead, FORCE! an opera in three acts. A group of Black and Brown women and femmes wait to enter a prison and escape a memory-erasing mold.

FORCE! had its world premiere in Chicago in March, 2024 at the MCA, and is currently on tour. It will be presented in 2024 by REDCAT in LA, Portland Institute Contemporary Art for TBA 2024, and The Vera List Center and the Chocolate Factory in New York.

FORCE! has received a 2020-2021 Graham Foundation Fellowship and a 2022-2023 Vera List Center Fellowship; and has been a recipient of a 2020 and 2021 MAP Fund Award, a 2022 NPN Creation Fund Grant, and a 2022 NEFA NTP Award.

See more about this project at: https://www.force-anopera.com/home

Artist Reflection

These collages are maps of prisons. I’ve been interviewing women, femmes, and queers around the United States about the experience of journeying inside prison. When I ask them to tell me how they remember it, it is impossible to separate their emotions—the anxiety, the fear, the excitement—from the architecture itself. Every metal detector, locker, and officer’s desk carries an emotional weight, and when they tell the story of their journeys inside, hallways and walls distend and contort around memory. 

Prisons, and their waiting rooms, are dramatic, emotional, chaotic, and familial. They are strikingly Black, brown, and homosocial. These spaces exist in reality—I’ve spent countless hours in them. But they also exist in the abstract, as places which, in the words of one of my interviewees, make “blatantly clear that this is what we have… All we really have is each other.” 

As I continue working on FORCE! an opera in three acts, a sprawlingly Black queer opera about femmes who wait, it strikes me that the voices of actual women, femmes, and queers—not characters or archetypes, but actual human beings—should be present, too. 

These collages are my attempt to bring life to what these folks remember.