With a parallel rise in DNA testing and widespread critique of police violence, civil asset forfeiture, and a host of other issues related to the American justice system, more and more attention is being paid to the issue of wrongful conviction and exoneration. In this innovative new work, artist Julie Green asks a simple question: when you’re stepping out of prison after spending years incarcerated for a crime you didn’t commit, what’s the first thing you want to eat? From the small details of life at such a moment, a vast new landscape of the world can emerge, and that is the core concept of First Meal. Against a backdrop of the flawed American legal system, something of beauty, pain, hope, and redemption can be found, centered around a seemingly simple question and response. The idea that a single meal can have huge meaning, or that food can have deep cultural and emotional resonance, is hardly new. The prison tradition of offering a condemned person a meal of choice before execution was long part of the media coverage of the death penalty, and has been explored as well by psychologists, documentary filmmakers, and others. Writers from Proust to Michael Pollan have explored the idea that food is never just food. Food is memory, emotion, and meaning. Green began First Meal in 2018 and partnered with the Center on Wrongful Convictions, part of Northwestern University’s School of Law, to gather the details of these food stories. As incorporated in the paintings, those exoneree stories are captured in the small details: state birds or flags from where the conviction took place, thumbprints representing DNA analysis, sentence dates, glow-in-the-dark skylines, and other symbols that work together to provide rounded portrayals.

Green’s paintings are paired with narrative accounts of those meals, written by Kirk Johnson, a former New York Times reporter, and drawn from the release questionnaires and, when exonerees consent, from follow-up interviews with them and their families and legal teams. The synthesis of art and text brings tells these intimate, often wrenching stories of gratitude, grief, astonishment, disbelief, euphoria—often all combined into one moment—in a unique way. First Meal seeks to inform and spread awareness, but also serve as a celebration of the stories, freedom, and human interests that unite us all.