The Big Graph

May 2014 - present
Eastern State Penitentiary
Philadelphia, PA
https://www.easternstate.org/explore/exhibits/big-graph

Awards: 
- 2015 American Association of Museums Excellence in Exhibition Award, Honorable Mention
- 2015 Pennsylvania Federation of Museum Institutional Award of Merit
- 2015 American Association of State and Local History Leadership in History Award

The United States imprisons 2.2 million citizens, the highest incarceration rate in the world, by far, and yet has no national prison museum. For its spring 2014 season, Eastern State Penitentiary introduced public dialogue around issues of crime, justice, and the changing face of our criminal justice system with a new exhibit, The Big Graph.

The Big Graph is a 16-foot tall, 3,500-pound plate steel sculpture that illustrates three sets of statistics, depending on the viewer’s position. From the south, The Big Graph illustrates the unprecedented growth in U.S. incarceration rates since 1900. From the north it illustrates the racial breakdown of the American prison population in 1970 and today. From the east, The Big Graph charts every nation in the world, both by rate of incarceration and by policies around capital punishment.

The project was initiated in the Fall of 2012 as part of a collaboration between Eastern State Penitentiary and University of the Arts Museum Studies, Industrial Design and Multimedia students enrolled in a new Prototyping Lab class. Students were asked by Eastern State to "make the current corrections statistics more memorable."

The initial concepts of The Big Graph were developed, designed and prototyped by Kenny Guglielmino, Koraldo Kajanaku, Thuy Tran, and Breanna Wucinich.

My Role: All stages of development and design, from prototyping to documentation and installation.