SAN FRANCISCO, July 3rd, 2026 – On Independence Day, 2026, Alcatraz Island will become the site of FREE: a city-scale, participatory public artwork by artist Nancy Baker Cahill, presented by Gray Area, the San Francisco nonprofit advancing technology-driven creativity.
Viewable from along the San Francisco waterfront in Augmented Reality (AR) through the free, bilingual 4th Wall app, FREE invites viewers worldwide to send “a message of solidarity—a kite, blessing, spell, poem, or personal story—with anyone held in detention in the United States, a loved one, stranger, or those whose names we don't know, and in so doing create a growing archive of support for the unjustly imprisoned or detained.” Each message takes flight as a digital "paper plane" that transforms into a bird, soaring toward the island and joining a vast, ever-growing flock.
FREE arrives at a charged moment in the island's history. In May 2025, the President announced he had directed federal agencies to rebuild and reopen Alcatraz—closed as a prison since 1963 and operated for decades as a National Park Service landmark—as a working federal penitentiary. FREE inverts that proposition. While the island was engineered to isolate and remove people, this artwork uses the same site to gather voices, render solidarity visible, and insist that no one is disposable.
"Alcatraz was engineered to be inescapable, a monument to the idea that some people should be permanently removed from society," said Nancy Baker Cahill. "FREE rejects that idea. Every message becomes a bird, and every act of solidarity makes the work larger and more alive. I want people to feel that freedom is something we build and insist upon together, in public—and that no one is beyond our care."
FREE launches on the Fourth of July, 2026—the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, commemorated across the country as the United States Semiquincentennial, or America250. As the nation marks a quarter-millennium of its founding ideals of liberty and self-government with what organizers describe as the largest anniversary observance in U.S. history, FREE takes up that same language of freedom and turns it toward those for whom it has been suspended, including children held in immigration detention and people held illegally in indefinite confinement. Staged amid the celebrations, the work poses a pointed question: on the day the country honors 250 years of declared liberty, to whom does that liberty actually extend? With habeas corpus under siege, who among us is actually free?
This question echoes Baker Cahill's core question in her 2020 landmark AR project, Liberty Bell, which appeared in over nine historically significant locations along the East Coast on July 4th. It also pays direct homage to the 2020 project In Plain Sight, organized by artists Cassils and Rafa Esparza, an abolitionist project of skywritten messages of solidarity over detention centers across the U.S.
The scale of the issue is intimate as well as systemic: research from Cornell University and FWD.us has found that roughly 45 percent of Americans (nearly one in two) have had an immediate family member incarcerated. Within the experience, participants can also choose to directly support organizations that recognize human dignity, fight carceral injustice, and offer healing to victims of mass incarceration.
FREE builds on Cahill’s celebrated body of site-specific, participatory AR work. Through her 4th Wall app, Baker Cahill's recent projects invite the public to co-create the artwork in real time, with every contribution appearing in the work itself. This model, used in previous works including Substrate at LACMA and CENTO, her permanent AR installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, forms the foundation for FREE's participatory architecture, allowing both on-site and remote audiences to meaningfully shape the work.
This work is also informed by Baker Cahill’s earlier large-scale projects including Liberty Bell (2020), which was commissioned by Art Production Fund and geolocated across nine U.S. sites including the Washington Monument reflecting pool and the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The piece was featured in The New York Times; and Margin of Error (2019), as well as presented at the Desert X Biennial.
The work is presented by Gray Area, an 18-year old San Francisco nonprofit advancing technology-driven creativity through public presentation, education, and research.
"For nearly two decades, Gray Area has used technology not for spectacle but to deepen our capacity for empathy and civic imagination," said Barry Threw, Executive Director of Gray Area. "FREE is exactly the kind of work we exist to support: grand in ambition, radically accessible, and rooted in the belief that art can change how we relate to one another."
FREE is free and open to all. Download the 4th Wall app (available for iOS and Android) and participate from anywhere in the world, July 4 – November 4, 2026.
