Prison Art Remains Unstoppable
The public longs for a peephole into prisons. I usually don’t need such a portal to prison life but I went to see the Museum of Modern Art exhibit “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration” anyway.
Arts in prison has a funny history. The Attica prison uprising of 1971 catalyzed the idea that inmates should be allowed to engage in artistic expression. Back in the 1970s, politicians chalked up organized prison disturbances to idleness, the idea that inmates sought to overthrow the carceral state because they were bored, rather than aggrievement.
That’s why Attica’s aftermath actually did a lot for the arts. A month after that insurrection, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition entered prisons and jails in New York state for education and arts programming. By the end of the 1970s, BECC had expanded to 14 states, mostly because wardens believed it was a way to prevent large-scale protests within their prisons.
As it is wont to do, funding became a problem for these endeavors, a particularly dire one when the Reagan administration disallowed the National Endowment for the Arts from providing money to the BECC.
The pieces in the MoMA exhibit come from the time after that, when art was almost lost; the paintings, drawings, sculpture, songs, films and multimedia projects are subversive and plucky at the same time.
They’re also proof that art is inevitable in prisons. No one and nothing - not a prison rule, not a lack of funding - can stop it.
The pieces on display are a curriculum in resourcefulness. Stacks of prison trays constitute one sculpture. Another artist, Dean Gillispie, built remarkably accurate miniature diners out of cigarette pack foil, pins, chipboard, popsicle sticks, pop cans, cassette tape cases, paint and radio parts.
Jesse Krimes created his “Purgatory” piece with no art supplies whatsoever. When Krimes was holed up in solitary confinement, he transferred images to soap from periodicals and fashioned a instrument from the positive end of a triple A battery to cut the playing cards that seemed destined for a career in solitaire and then a prison trash can. Instead they’re now shacked up with curious esthetes in probably the largest and most influential museum of modern art in the world. It’s not a bad bounce.
Krimes’ other installment in the MoMA exhibit, titled “Apokaluptein: 16389067,” is a wall-sized collection of prison bed sheets that bear digital transfers from newspapers and magazines, drawing and painting. In an interview, Krimes describes needing a lookout to warn him when staff was coming because his art was destroying government property - the sheets.
James “Yaya” Hough drew pictures of bodies on prison forms and menus. At first it seems unfortunate that these were the only canvasses Hough had, but then you realize that no other background would suffice.
Formal arts training in prisons can reduce recidivism. When the Actors Gang Prison Project - the group’s artistic director is actor Tim Robbins - entered 13 California prisons to offer intensive, theatrical arts courses, the number of behavioral incidents decreased by 89%.
The problem is that progress isn’t guaranteed. A 2019 audit of the California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation found that the department - which spent $8 million on arts programming in conjunction with the California Arts Council - wasn’t doing a bang-up job at rehabilitating people.
I’ve engaged in it myself, but I tire of this constant return-on-investment analysis of what should happen in prisons. I don’t think we can justify, morally, denying incarcerated people books or colored pencils. But we do. At least we were. Now more private organizations are paying for art training and supporting artists, according to Rutgers University professor and author of a book on the art in the MoMA exhibit Nicole R. Fleetwood. Fleetwood is a guest curator of the MoMA show.
It wasn’t until I stood in front of Hough’s illustrations on the backs of pink, two-hole-punched triplicate forms that I realized I’d seen it before. Not from him but from the women I lived with. Funded or not, art surrounded me in prison.
Someone was always drawing or crocheting or weaving or ripping magazines and spreading cheap clear toothpaste over the pieces to make a collage. Or they were singing, rapping, learning modern dance. In fact, women I served time with had their own exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, place settings they colored and illustrated to show who they’d most like to dine with. I probably made the least art of all of us and I wrote a book of poetry. At the time, these activities seemed to me to be inconsequential ways to pass the time.
But after seeing the MoMA exhibit I realize that I undersold them. Philosophers have connected art and freedom for centuries. Journalist, philosopher and Nobel laureate Albert Camus said “Without freedom, no art.” German poet and philosopher Freidrich Schiller said “Art is the daughter of freedom.” Chinese contemporary artist and activist Ai Weiwei said “The purpose of art is the fight for freedom.” There probably isn’t a philosopher or artist who hasn’t connected art and freedom.
If art and freedom are that entwined, then the generation of it must be a reentry of sorts, an exit from custody. Art has to start in restraint. That doesn’t mean it has to start in prison per se, but its birthplace is constriction. Making something - it doesn’t matter if it’s a doodle, a ditty or a dance move - is a jailbreak, even for people walking the street. It’s just that, as the MoMA exhibit shows, prison has proven itself to be a highly efficient crucible.
Defund it, outlaw it, overlook arts programming in prisons. None of that will ever arrest creation in confinement.