Project Overview

As we observed our 35th anniversary in 2023, the Michener Art Museum was honored to receive a significant grant from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage that allows us to delve deeper into our site’s history as the Bucks County Jail. A multi-year initiative, Behind These Walls: Reckoning with Incarceration, acknowledges and explores the history of this place through new interpretation of the museum’s building and gardens developed with a Community Advisory Committee and participatory art installations by multidisciplinary artist jackie sumell.

Behind These Walls is an immersive journey into this site’s complex history. Through the transformative power of participatory art and community engagement, we’re exploring the narratives and artifacts that underlie stories of displacement, enslavement, and most notably, confinement and incarceration that occurred here. We invite you to explore this site for a look behind—and beyond—our museum’s walls and to bear witness to the evolution of a place that reflects changing societal values and aspirations.