Incorrigibles is a transmedia art project that focuses on youth justice and social services for girls, using the past to shed light on the present and a better future through art, storytelling, and healing modalities.

When: March 5, 2025
Time: 6:15: 8:00
Location: Casa Hispanica 612 W 116th New York, NY
Register: In-person
Register: Zoom

Incorrigibles project director and artist Alison Cornyn will share what she has learned in her long-term research into the New York State Training School for Girls (1904-1975), the largest girls’ prison in the U.S. at the time. Girls throughout New York, including the jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, were sent to this institution over the 70 years it was open.

The resulting documentary art project, Incorrigibles, was born from the stories and lives of girls incarcerated there. The project collects and shares these stories using diverse components, including a traveling exhibition, short films, free public events, workshops, a website, and an artist book. Incorrigibles aims to reexamine and challenge the language and conceptions historically used to label, define, and confine girls.

In 2016, as part of the Mellon Foundation-funded project “Aging and its Tropes,” Cornyn presented some of that original research with photographs and diaries of some of the women who had been locked up at the NY State Training School for Girls. That project has grown and has received support from the NEH, Humanities New York, The Mellon Foundation, The Rubin Foundation, and other organizations. Cornyn has recently completed a new short documentary, Hilda O. vs. New York State, with Heather Greer. Hilda, now 83 years old, was remanded to the reformatory in the 1950s at 15 years old. She is suing NY State for sexual abuse that she endured while she was there.

Cornyn will detail the project’s trajectory, followed by an engaging conversation with Mia Ruyter.

This discussion is free and open to the public. You can attend in person or virtually. More information can be found here.

Register: In-person
Register: Zoom

About the speakers:
Alison Cornyn is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator whose work often incorporates public memory and archives. For over 20 years, Cornyn has initiated new forms of storytelling in installations and online, investigating pressing social issues from multiple perspectives. Many of her projects address the US criminal legal system and mass incarceration. Her current project, Incorrigibles, examines youth justice for girls in New York – past and present. Incorrigibles investigates the long-term use of stigmatizing language to define and confine young women and tells the stories of women who were incarcerated in their youth to create an archive of first-person testimonies that counter and broaden institutional histories. Her work has received numerous awards, including a Creative Capital award for her pioneering interactive documentary about US prisons, a Peabody Award, the Gracie Allen for Women in Media Award, and Pew’s Batten Award for Innovation. She serves on the Board of the NYC Municipal Archives and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in NYC.

Mia Ruyter is the Education and Outreach Manager for the SOF/Heyman Center. She coordinates the educational programming offered by JIE in New York City jails. She is a doctoral student in Art and Art Education at Teachers College, and received an MFA from Hunter College in New York City.

Cosponsors:
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities
African American & African Diaspora Studies Department & Institute for Research in African American Studies
Columbia School of Journalism
Department of English and Comparative Literature
Department of History
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
Sing Sing Prison Museum
Tamer Center for Social Enterprise

Organizer:
Justice-in-Education

Please feel free to share this event with your contacts. We look forward to seeing you!

Sincerely,
The Incorrigibles Team
#incorrigiblegirls
#endgirlsincarceration