This work was spurred by Irene Burkner’s 2017 uncovering of the eugenic advocacy of a prominent lay leader of the church, Robert Millikan, who promoted forced sterilization through his leadership at the Human Betterment Foundation. This work is dedicated to the tens of thousands of survivors of forced sterilization in California state institutions between 1907 and 1979.*
In 2025, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee and other members of Neighborhood Church came together to collectively create this work as part of their continued engagement with the congregation’s history. In this co-created work, each participant pressed clay between their palms and fingers, closing their hand in the position of a fist around the clay. Those clay pieces, collective expressions of pain and power, were fired and placed together in a container. They were placed alongside the same forms made by Dawn Wooten, who in 2020 witnessed and exposed the eugenic practices of forced sterilization and medical neglect brought upon people in ICE custody at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia in 2020. This gathering of forms reflects the collectivity of anti-eugenic solidarity across space and time.
The installation extends the interior architecture of the room, with the same interior fist forms pinned onto wood boards. The boards were taken from a table that sat across the street from the former Millikan Laboratory at the Claremont Colleges, where another struggle to address the violence of his eugenic advocacy led to its eventual renaming in 2020. These elements are installed both to draw attention to the structure of the room, and to hold tension: the historical memory of Neighborhood Church, the former namesake of the room and its subsequent renaming, and the ongoing need to remember and reckon with our past.
The work is named to recognize detention itself as a practice of reproductive control, following Jess Whatcott’s theorization of carceral eugenics, following their realization that “reproductive injustice continues even if sterilization surgeries are halted […] incarceration, in all its forms, continues to function as eugenics, just as policies of institutionalization did in the early twentieth century.”** We must fight against carceral eugenics in all of its interconnected forms, including mass incarceration, threats to return to mass institutionalization, and immigrant detention. Free them all.
* Alexandra Minna Stern, Nicole L. Novak, Natalie Lira, Kate O’Connor, Siobán Harlow, and Sharon Kardia, California’s Sterilization Survivors: An Estimate and Call for Redress (American Journal of Public Health, 2016) https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303489
** Jess Whatcott, Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024), xiv.