¶ … images from the university gallery museum. Those works were the Victim, Abolish the Death Penalty, George Jackson Lives, Ruth Snyder, and Lynching. All five works examine how violence has become an institutionalized part of modern American society, so much so that it seems almost commonplace. Taken as a whole, the pieces are powerful, because they serve as a reminder that when violence is institutionalized and permitted, it creates an atmosphere of violence in society. The images also serve as reminders that violence, whether government-sanctioned or individually driven, often targets those in society with the least power. While powerful people are not wholly immune from violence, they are not nearly as likely to be victimized as people in marginalized positions. The first work I examined is called The Victim. It depicts a skull-head type figure, done in stark blacks with some splashes of red, and it is clear the image in the artwork is not alive. It features text at the bottom of the work that discusses the state-sanctioned killing of another person, and how that makes society more depraved than the crimes it seeks to punish. I am not necessarily opposed to the death penalty, even though logical arguments suggest that lifetime incarceration is less expensive and that the death penalty does not deter murders. There are some crimes where I believe the perpetrators deserve killing. However, this work served to remind me that in every execution, there is a murder, and there is a victim. Of course, there is also the initial victim of the crime, but the state is sanctioning the taking of a human...

If taking a human life is so inappropriate that it is a capital offense, how does the state justify taking that power onto itself and exercising it on its citizens, when alternatives that are just as effective in maintaining public safety, such as life in prison, exist? The reality is that the state should not debase itself and lower itself to the standards set by those people who are considered criminals, no matter how base and foul the crime. The state is supposed to serve as a collective consciousness, not a collective subconscious. In Freudian terms, the state should be society's superego, but when society permits the death penalty, the state is acting as society's id, instead. In fact, it is easy to look at The Victim and see the skull-like image reflecting back not an individual, but the whole of what society has become.
In Abolish the Death Penalty, there is an image, black, which is not accidental, with red writing, imploring the State of Texas to Abolish the Death Penalty. The text included in the artwork suggests that the art of institutionalized killing has deadened the natural, human response to death. I actually disagree with this artwork in a significant way; I do not feel that the natural, human response to death is one of horror or outrage. Instead, the natural, human response to death in the same social group is one of horror and outrage, but deaths in other groups seem to have little impact on the individual. All of human history has been plagued by groups fighting for dominance and killing one another for seemingly inconsequential reasons. These killings are considered justified because the people are "other." To me, this artwork suggests the same idea. Texas is not an overwhelmingly black state, but its death row is very disproportionately black, as are the death rows in all…