Kim Wilson

Kim Wilson is an artist, educator, writer, and organizer. She is the co-founder, co-host and producer of Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. A social scientist by training, Dr. Wilson has a Ph.D. in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and her work focuses on examining the interconnected functioning of systems, including poverty, racism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy, within a carceral structure. Her work delves into the extension and expansion of these systems beyond their physical manifestations of cages and fences, to reveal how carcerality is imbued in policy and practice. She explores how these systems synergize to exacerbate the challenges faced by under-resourced communities, revealing a deliberate intention to undermine and further marginalize vulnerable populations. 

Dr. Wilson’s work is rooted in a phenomenological approach that centers people’s lived experiences and meaning construction. An interdisciplinary artist, she uses digital media as social practice art, and seamlessly moves between using storytelling, research, data, community voices, painting, collage, fiber arts, writing, and poetry to educate and raise awareness about the harms of incarceration. In doing so, she harnesses the communicative and transformative power of art to advocate for change. Kim’s work escapes facile explanations and rejects the normative tendency to isolate and situate art within rigid categories; Instead, she sees her all of her work as social and political commentary because her identity as a Black Woman means that anything and everything that she creates is filtered through the lens of racial capitalism. 

As the mother of three adult children, a daughter and two sons, Kim’s work is deeply personal. Both of her sons are currently sentenced to life in prison, and she shares her experience as a way to explore the devastating impact of incarceration. Kim and her youngest son, Paul, a talented portrait artist, collaborated on a series of mixed media embroidered portraits that were featured in the group exhibit, ‘Home Fires’ at the University of New England 2021-2022. The series aims to challenge notions of what is possible. 

In 2022, Kim had spine surgery to correct a nearly twelve year debilitating injury. She writes that “pain and disability make you invisible and disposable to a world that already doesn’t see you as fully human.” Her recovery has taken longer than expected, but her view is that the road to rehabilitation is not linear and requires system level changes to address medical neglect and ableism. 

A history enthusiast, Dr. Wilson’s work draws upon the rich tradition of liberation movements in the U.S. and internationally, and the contributions of living, breathing abolitionists that have taught her about building accountable communities, and transformative justice. Kim’s latest project is a forthcoming co-edited volume with Maya Schenwar, published by Haymarket Books, that considers parenting and caregiving from abolitionist perspectives. The book includes essays by Harsha Walia, Sarah Tyson, Dorothy Roberts, Shira Hassan, Victoria Law and others.