Gregory Sale

Collaborating with individuals and communities on aesthetic responses to social challenges, artist, educator Gregory Sale creates and coordinates large-scale and often long-term public projects. For close to 20 years, his work has focused on issues of mass incarceration. System-impacted individuals and communities help conceptualize social-aesthetic structures, co-produce artistic components, and direct the advocacy intention of the work. 

More specifically, Sale has undertaken a series of projects focused on reframing the narrative of reentering society after incarceration, culminating in Future IDs at Alcatraz (2018-2019). This yearlong, socially engaged project, exhibition, and programmatic series was created with core-project collaborators Dr. Luis Garcia, Kirn Kim, Sabrina Reid, and Jessica Tully and in partnership with National Park Service, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, and 20 community organizations. 

Since the onset of the pandemic, Sale and a group of system-impacted leaders have formed the Future IDs Art and Justice Leadership Cohort to expand their understanding of the power of artistic production to support justice reform and to further their effectiveness as catalysts of social change. 

His work has received support from Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Creative Capital Foundation in Emerging Fields, A Blade of Grass/David Rockefeller Fund Fellowship in Criminal Justice, Art Matters, SPArt (Social Practice Art), the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and artist residency awards (Yaddo, MacDowell, Grand Central Art Center, Headlands, Montalvo, Ucross, and Centre d’Art Marnay Art Centre).

Based in Phoenix and Los Angeles, Sale is Professor of Expanded Arts and Public Practice for the School of Art, Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts, Arizona State University.