Biography

Hunt is an artist, writer and educator who engages social ideas and actions. His work looks at structures that allow some people to accumulate power while keeping others from getting it, while learning from the ways we come to know, contribute to or resist these structures. Rather than seeing art and activism as mutual and complementary spheres of practice — drawing upon the ideas and aesthetics of social movements, cultural theory and art alike. The bulk of his work has focused on the U.S. prison system and the many social and political issues that refract through it — ecologies and land use, its aesthetic operation, and the grassroots political movements that emerge to oppose it.

A recent fellow of the Art for Justice Fund and Ford Foundation, his works have included short and feature length documentary, video installation, mapping, performance, photography, and an experimental dance school; often in collaboration with community organizations, which has included Critical Resistance, Californians for a Responsible Budget, the Underground Scholars, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Release Aging People in Prison, Southerners on New Ground, Project South, Citizens for Quality Education, the Youth Justice Coalition, Mass Liberation Arizona, and Friends and Family of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children. 

Hunt is the recipient of the 2019 Creative Capital and Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the 2018 Graham Foundation Exhibition Grant, and the 2015 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, among others. His works have shown in venues ranging from community centers to prisons to museums, including MoMA and P.S.1, the ASU Art Museum, Pitzer College Art Galleries, Project Row Houses, the Made in LA Biennial of the Hammer Museum, the Tate Modern, Documenta 12, Sinopale Biennial in Turkey, New York’s Woodbourne State Correctional Institute and Green Haven State Prison in Indiana.

His writings include the book, Notes on the Emptying of a City, and the forthcoming Degrees of Visibility, a series of nine free newspapers, and they have appeared in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and multiple edited volumes on art and politics. Hunt has taught in the Photo and Media Program of CalArts’ Art School since 2008, which he co-directed and directed from 2010–2019.

For full CV, please request it through the contact link.