If you grimace when you see those click-bait ads of local mugshots (I'm not linking to one because they're everything that's wrong with the internet), odds are you might have heard about this mugshot art at Tre Amici and thought, "nope nope nope nope nope."

Reader, that would be a mistake, because Tampa Bay area artist Samson Huang's Portraits of Mugshots isn't a laughing matter. There's plenty to take in, and it's not "look at how awful these people look/are/acted" — rather, the solo exhibition is a commentary about private, for-profit prisons in Florida. Huang used eight real-life mugshots to create the exhibit, and he hopes that the work will make people think about the state's seven for-profit prisons (five of them reported a net income of $146.2 million in 2017, Huang says) and how this system makes human beings into a commodity.

Portraits of Mugshots | Tre Amici @ The Bunker, 1907 19th St. N., Ybor City | March 3-31 | Learn more

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This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 7, 2019.