Sum Follow

One Book One Northwestern, 2020–21

This artwork was selected in response to themes in Northwestern’s community-wide reading of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014) by Bryan Stevenson.

In Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson chronicles the seemingly impossible task of working within a legal and carceral system where protocols and systems defy logic. In following Stevenson’s fight for the freedom of his client Walter McMillian, the reader begins to understand how the criminal justice system—from the initial arrest to the sentencing protocols—is designed to allow for the continuation of discriminatory practices that have dire consequences.

The artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed uses a visual language familiar to many—rows of circles from a multiple-choice exam—to encourage us to question the logic of systems whose authority might be taken for granted. The print looks like a warped negative of a machine-readable answer sheet, with the circles contorted in a way that undermines the perceived order of the whole exercise. The text, "sums follow the desired inequality," draws on the language of mathematical proofs, in which a conclusion is demonstrated through a series of logical steps. She also plays on the dual valence of the word "inequality," innocuous in the context of math, but highly charged in the context of social justice.