In the 1970’s and 80’s, American saw the building of many new museums and many new prisons. The old ones are still there, too, and they are full.

The artist Andrea Fraser has created a powerful and disturbing exhibit at the new Whitney Museum on it’s vast 5th floor. She challenged visitors to bring together two American experiences,  a museum and a notorious prison. The exhibit space is empty, it is an acoustic space, filled with sounds recorded in a cell block of Sing Sing prison, just north of New York City on the Hudson River.

It is disorienting at first, until you understand you are hearing the shouts and clanging and conflict of a prison – one kind of experience for many Americans – and walking freely in this beautiful space, open to the big city around it. The views are beautiful, the sounds are chilling. She connects the two in ways that made me squirm.

Her idea was to try and bridge the great divide between the people in prisons and the people in museums.

This comes against the backdrop of the harsh and even hateful rhetoric directed at poor people and at prisoners and people arrested for crimes.

Both prisons and museums are powerful and expansive institutions in American life. Both are booming in their own way.  I never thought to connect the two until I saw and heard this exhibit.  And that, of course, is what artists and writers are supposed to do: make people think.

I have learned that many people like to pretend that they want to think, but in practice, most people don’t want to think too hard about things. The exhibit is a triumph in that way.

It is really, in a sense, art about compassion. We lock up all kinds of people like animals and forget about them, and almost all of them are poor people from various minorities, especially young African-American men. A country that can build and sustain so many lavish museums can perhaps do better  in re-thinking the lives of the millions of people in prisons. You could hear their voices in the exhibit.

They were all the more powerful for not being seen, appropriate since we don’t want to know anything about them once we put the away. We do throw away the keys.

In this vast exhibition space, flanked by stunning views of Manhattan, the Hudson River and New Jersey, you are in two worlds at once, you can’t help but think of a country so torn in it’s impulses, so angry and disconnected from it’s compassionate soul.