Artist Statement

Guiltless

Iris Berry

The art piece consists of many names of the people who have been proven innocent. The colors of the names are a scale of how many years they were imprisoned, ranging from 7 years to 43 years. The word guiltless being colorless represents the unfairness of how these people had almost most of their life taken; others were put to death for a crime they didn't commit. 

The big idea of this painting is to show people that there are more people than you think who have been wrongfully imprisoned. Since 1973, at least 190 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. have been exonerated to be released from prison. The genuine key emotion in this piece was the shock of the amount of names I found in a simple search.

I learned a lot about organizations that help with these cases and how each individual organization has many finished and ongoing cases. That means that the person who truly committed the crime was not the one who was punished, which can be a very unsettling feeling. I hope others take from my piece that these people have had almost everything taken away from them, and they weren't even the people that committed the crime.