UMD Senior Art Exhibit Focuses on the Falsely Incarcerated

The opening night of Holly Brown's exhibit also featured guest speaker Herman Lindsey

DULUTH, Minn. — A new exhibit has opened at UMD’s Tweed Museum of Art, focusing on wrongful convictions and the death penalty.

Senior Holly Brown created the exhibit, “Exonerated,” to show the impact of wrongful convictions on people’s lives around the country. Brown is a non-traditional student at UMD, returning years later to finish her degree. She says one of the things that stuck with from starting college was a speech she wrote on the death penalty. For her, this exhibit is a way to bring her college experience full circle.

“Keeping the exonerees and their stories in mind was something that was extremely important for me,” Brown said. “With the portraits that I have on the wall, I fully realized each person’s face in my illustrative style and then I masked out the portion of their life that they were wrongfully incarcerated.

“You can see with Sabrina Butler, she started on death row when she was nineteen. So you can see how far into the beginning of her life those lines were.”

Following the debut of Brown’s exhibit, a man who spent three years on death row spoke. Herman Lindsey was wrongfully convicted of robbery and murder in Florida. After being exonerated in 2009, Lindsey has worked as an advocate for others wrongfully convicted and end the death penalty.

“This fight is about the fight of the people,” Lindsey said. “When I was sentenced to die, the court said, ‘we the people of the state of Florida hereby sentence you to die by lethal injection.’ And every court says that when they sentence someone, ‘we the people,’ and I want the people to understand that we have the power to stand up and say ‘no, not in our name.'”

Through Brown’s artwork and Lindsey’s organization, Witness to Innocence, they hope to spark conversations and change. While the death penalty is not legal in Minnesota, it is still legal at the federal level.