Participants engage with Maria Gaspar’s project “Disappearance Jail Texas” at a punch party at the Blaffer Art Museum on October 3, 2026, in Houston, Texas. | Audrey Szeto/The Cougar
The Blaffer Art Museum hosted a punch party on Oct. 3, which explored themes of incarceration, captivity and freedom in Maria Gaspar’s project “Disappearance Jail Texas.”
The idea behind the workshop, led by Gaspar, was to punch holes into photographs of carceral facilities and imagine what could replace the facility instead.
“Many people that I’ve spoken to say ‘instead of a prison, why can’t we have a school?’” Gaspar said. “Or why can’t we have a beautiful park? That’s what the invitation is, for us to collectively think about how these places impact us and what we might want to see instead.”
Participants can look through a list of different Texas facilities which include jails, prisons and immigrant detention camps, and find the exact facility on the wall of photographs.
“Unlike other artworks, which you cannot touch, these you grab with your hands,” Gaspar said. “They record the history of a community within that state.”
Women’s Caucus for Art member Suzanne Buckland was surprised when she saw what was in the photograph she chose to punch out.
“The detention center has playground equipment in there,” Buckland said. “It’s behind this big fence with barbed wire, and that says a lot. It needs to go.”
One of the photographs prompted participant Nara Lesser to think about mental health in relation to incarceration.
“The first picture I punched was of a prison mental health facility,” Lesser said. “As someone who has a fair number of mental illnesses, I can’t imagine how awful the care, if there even is any care, is.”
As part of the project, Gaspar is interested in how carceral facilities are represented in the political imagination, how the images make people feel and how the images teach people to normalize an idea.
“We know that incarceration in the United States is highly racialized,” Gaspar said. “We know that it targets poor people and trans people. Therefore, I became interested in how, as an artist, I can create the artworks that can speak to the nuances of what it means to incarcerate people, and what it means to live with incarceration in our lives.”
The project is a part of Gaspar’s exhibition, “We Press Our Hands to the Steel Curtain.” Her exhibition is inspired by the demolition of a jail in her childhood neighborhood, which was predominantly a Mexican immigrant community.
“As a first generation immigrant, it resonates because of the recent ice abductions that have skyrocketed,” Gaspar said. “And it begets the question about how we dehumanize and criminalize people.”
Texas is the sixth state where Gaspar has held a punch party. Her goal is to hold punch parties in all 50 states and continue fostering conversations about incarceration.
“When you think of prisons, you only think of how there’s lots of bad people there,” said participant Wayne Rogers. “But, maybe there is a bright side, that they are trying to rehabilitate themselves and make a better life for themselves.”
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