Red

Anon.

Red, circa 1970’s 

Woven cigarette packaging

Attica Correctional Facility, Attica, New York

Red is a wallet created from Camel and Pall Mall cigarette wrappers. It is conventional in form and direct in design. Essentially, it is a red patterned folder with a single ivory-colored stripe restating its form and isolating its red center double bar. Recurrent voided spaces give dimension to the wallet by creating a suggestion of relief in its surface.

The Attica Correction facility is a New York maximum-security prison built in 1930 to house the most harden criminals at the time. In 1971, it was the site of one of America’s most violent prison riots resulting in 43 deaths. The riot protested the prison’s unhealthy living conditions and cruel treatment of inmates. During four days of negotiations, as the nation watched, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller refused to come to the prison. Instead he ordered the New York State police to bomb the prison yard with tear gas. In the gunfire that followed, police and prison guards killed staff and inmates alike. Eventually, the prison was retaken but the lawsuits that would followed, despite President Richard Nixon’s hearty approval, would show what a horrible miscalculation the state’s response had been.