Notes
1
Calling it a “semiotic gesture” is not to discount its material impact. Trump’s many symbolic and impractical gestures have been incalculable in terms of the unnecessary deaths, traumas, and harms they have inflicted on people worldwide.
2
Kent Blansett, Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and the Red Power Movement (Yale University Press, 2018), 85.
3
Nick Estes, host, Red Nation Podcast, “Alcatraz Is Not an Island w/ LaNada War Jack,” November 18, 2019 →.
4
Kerri Young, “The American Indian Center in San Francisco,” SF Heritage, August 21, 2021 →.
6
Dean Radar, Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the Nmai (University of Texas Press, 2011).
7
The inhumane conditions of Alligator Alcatraz have been widely characterized as similar to a concentration camp. Detainees have described being held in cages, denied food and clean water, and coerced into signing documents in English without necessary translation. As of writing this, an appeals court has overturned the order of a federal judge in Miami to close Alligator Alcatraz. It currently remains open.
8
It may be that Trump unconsciously senses that Alcatraz was fortified to protect gold, matching his own pastiche aesthetic coated in gilt. Going further, one could argue that Alcatraz’s fortification laid the groundwork of Trump’s obsession with gold as a signifier of American greatness.
9
James P. Delgado, Gold Rush Port: The Maritime Archaeology of San Francisco’s Waterfront (University of California Press, 2009).
10
Examples include the 1999 traveling exhibition “Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception,” curated by Douglas R. Nickel and Maria Morris Hambourg; the 2014 exhibition “Carleton Watkins: The Stanford Albums,” curated by Connie Wolf; and critical texts written by scholars such as Siobhan Angus, Martin A. Berger, and Elizabeth Hutchinson, among others.
11
This is addressed in detail in my forthcoming book Picturing the Rock: Alcatraz, Photography and the Making of California.
12
This history of failure resonates with Trump’s use of the idea of Alcatraz as a distraction from his disastrous policies.
13
Donna L. Van Raaphorst, Alcatraz—The History of an Island Prison: From the Development to an American Myth (Edwin Mellen Press, 2011).
14
This terracing is visible in Watkins’s photograph Alcatraz and Black Point from Russian Hill.
15
Notably, he photographed the Lava Bed Wars from 1872–73, during which the US seized the ancestral territory of the Modocs in California and Oregon. In order to create a photograph of heightened dramatic intrigue, Muybridge posed Loa-kum Ar-nuk, a member of the Warm Springs tribe working as a scout for the US, as “Modoc Warrior on the War Path” with a gun behind a rock formation. He intentionally constructed an image of a threatening enemy to circulate as propaganda. The same year as the photograph, 1873, two members of the Modoc Nation, Brancho and Sloluck, were sent to Alcatraz for life sentences. Very little is known about their time on the island. Barancho died on the island and Sloluck was sent to Fort Leavenworth in 1878.
16
His imprisonment was short lived. Kinne and two others staged a daring escape, slipping away by boat.
17
Maria Briceño, Louis Jacobson, and Amy Sherman, “Fact-Checking Trump’s remarks at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ on Immigration and Medicaid,” PBS NewsHour, July 2, 2025 →.
18
Chris Briggs, “A Bird’s Eye View of Alcatraz,” 2015 →.
19
See →. Another example of a recent site-responsive work engaging with the media history of Alcatraz is Live from Alcatraz (2022) by Raven Chacon. He engaged with the sonic legacy of the Native American occupation of the island, filling the former prison hospital with sounds from the occupation, especially clips from Radio Free Alcatraz, a radio show hosted by John Trudell that was broadcast nightly from the island during the occupation.
20
Jason Fagone and Julie Johnson, “The Killing of Richard Oakes,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 19, 2023 →.
© 2026 e-flux and the author
