If you’re familiar with Julie Green’s work, you already know about their long-term, ongoing advocacy project, The Last Supper. Since 2000, Green has spent half of each year painting final meals of executed US prisoners on found plates. It’s a project they plan to continue until the death penalty is abolished. While much progress has been made in that direction in the last twenty years (more than I would have guessed before attending Green’s lecture on the topic five years ago), it is still far from happening.

First Meal, a painting series Green began in 2018, really grew out of the relationships and knowledge Green developed through The Last Supper. It addresses a less-visible aspect of our troubled justice system: wrongful convictions. Unlike final meals of executed prisoners, individuals who were wrongfully convicted and subsequently released, the first meals these individuals eat following release are not a matter of public record. In many ways, wrongfully convicted and released individuals fall through the cracks. It often takes years, sometimes decades or lifetimes, before wrongful convictions are recognized as such; and even then, not all are granted exoneration, for a host of complicated and often problematic reasons.

To collect the stories on which Green bases the First Meal paintings, Green collaborates with The Center on Wrongful Convictions to create a questionnaire and invite participation. Aware of the time already wasted and lost for these individuals, Green allows the CWC to facilitate communication and identify participants (except in a few cases, which are noted in the artwork descriptions). Participants are paid a stipend and a print of the finished work, and proceeds from the sale of work are shared with the CWC or other organizations that helped secure the individual’s release.