The Warehouse: Opening Reception and Panel

Join Rachel Herzing, James Kilgore, and Vic Liu for a conversation on incarceration, resistance, and abolition through art and organizing. Bringing together perspectives from movement-building, writing, and visual art, this panel will explore how creative practice and collective action challenge systems of punishment and imagine alternatives.

The discussion will reflect on the role of art in shaping political consciousness, sustaining resistance, and building toward abolitionist futures. The conversation will open The Warehouse exhibition and set the stage for the programs that follow.

Running from April 4 through June 28, 2026, The Warehouse is a collaboration between artist and writer Vic Liu, abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba, and the Bedford branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. The project features more than two dozen new, full-scale paintings by Liu that cover the library's walls, transforming the public space into an immersive exploration of resistance, survival, and possibility.

Find a full list of programming here.

 

Rachel Herzing is an organizer, activist, and advocate fighting the violence of surveillance, policing, and imprisonment. Herzing is the co-author, with Justin Piché, of How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement against Imprisonment and is a member of the Institute for Abolitionist Accompaniment. Herzing was executive director of Center for Political Education, a resource for political organizations on the left and progressive social movements; codirector of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex; and director of research and training at Creative Interventions, a community resource that developed interventions to interpersonal harm that do not rely on policing, imprisonment, or traditional social services. She lives in New York City.

 

Vic Liu is a multidisciplinary information artist and author who uses design to communicate complex information with empathy. She is author of The Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Mass Incarceration (with James Kilgore), as well as a visually designed masturbation sex-ed book, Bang! Masturbation for All Genders and Abilities.

 

 

James Kilgore is a researcher and activist based in Urbana, Illinois. He is the author of six books, including the National Book Foundation Award-winning Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People’s Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time. He drafted four of those volumes during his six and a half years in California prisons. He is currently a Building Community Power Fellow at Community Justice Exchange and formerly a research fellow at MediaJustice, where he founded the Challenging E-Carceration project. He is also director of advocacy and outreach for FirstFollowers Reentry Program in Champaign, Illinois.