Orange Is The New Black

2016

Orange Is The New Black redirects the visual force of Pop toward historical witness. First exhibited at Joseph Gross Gallery in Chelsea, New York, on November 3, 2016, the series comprises six monumental, hand-painted and hand-pulled silkscreen works addressing public health abuses, surveillance, drug policy, mass incarceration, and policing.

The paintings connect the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, COINTELPRO, Nixon’s War on Drugs, the crack cocaine epidemic, and the expansion of the carceral state. Bennett examines how different institutions and administrations have exercised power over Black life across generations.

Orange binds these histories through its associations with warning, emergency, visibility, and incarceration. The works’ scale demands a physical encounter with histories repeatedly minimized or forgotten. Together, they ask who holds power, who bears its consequences, and what accountability requires.