The Artists Prison

The Artists' Prison looks askance at the workings of personality and privilege, sexuality, authority, and artifice in the art world. Imagined through the heavily redacted testimony of the prison's warden, written by Alexandra Grant, and powerfully allusive images by Eve Wood, the prison is a brutal, Kafkaesque landscape where creativity can be a criminal offence and sentences range from the allegorical to the downright absurd. In The Artists' Prison, the act of creating becomes a strangely erotic condemnation, as well as a means of punishment and transformation. It is in these very transformations--sometimes dubious, sometimes oddly sentimental--that the book's critical edge is sharpest. In structural terms, The Artists' Prison represents a unique visual and literary intersection, in which Wood's drawings open spaces of potential meaning in Grant's text, and the text, in turn, acts as a framework in which the images can resonate and intensify in significance.

"A powerful document of the inner lives and creative visions of men and women rendered invisible by America’s prison system. More than two million people are currently behind bars in the United States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and communities; it also exposes them to shocking levels of deprivation and abuse and subjects them to the arbitrary cruelties of the criminal justice system. Yet, as Nicole Fleetwood reveals, America’s prisons are filled with art. Despite the isolation and degradation they experience, the incarcerated are driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them. Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author’s own family experiences with the penal system, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions—including solitary confinement—these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender. The impact of their art, Fleetwood observes, can be felt far beyond prison walls. Their bold works, many of which are being published for the first time in this volume, have opened new possibilities in American art. As the movement to transform the country’s criminal justice system grows, art provides the imprisoned with a political voice. Their works testify to the economic and racial injustices that underpin American punishment and offer a new vision of freedom for the twenty-first century."

Filled with quotes from men and women prisoners and Kornfeld's own anecdotes, Cellblock Visions shows how these artists, most of them having no previous training, turn to their work for a sense of self-worth, an opportunity to vent rage, or a way to find peace. We see how the artists deal with the cramped space, limited light, and narrow vistas of their prison studios, and how the security bans on many art supplies lead them to ingenious resourcefulness, as in extracting color from shampoo and weaving with cigarette wrappers. Kornfeld covers the traditional prison arts, such as soap carving and tattoo, and devotes a major section to painting, where we see miniatures depicting themes of alienation and escape, idyllic landscapes framed by bars, portraits of women living in a fantasy world, large canvasses filled with erotic and religious symbolism and violent action. The brief, vivid biographies of each artist portray that individual's experience of crime, prison, and art itself.

Across the world, performing arts programmes are increasing in number, scope and professionalism. They attract increasing academic and media attention. Theoretical and applied research, organizational evaluation reports, documentary films and journalism are detailing prison arts and creating recognition that this body of work is becoming a valued part of the correctional enterprise. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests music, theatre, poetry and dance can contribute to prisoner wellbeing, management, rehabilitation and reintegration. Performing Arts in Prisons: Creative Perspectives explores prison arts in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Chile, and creates a new framework for understanding its practices.

Collection of essays and art by scholars, artists and activists both in and out of prison that reveal the many dimensions of women’s incarcerated experiences.

128-G is a collection of art and writing from inmates at Calipatria State Prison in Southern California. Topics in the book range from art to sex to science and philosophy to criminal justice reform to American culture. "What you have in your hands is not only a collection of art, but a collection of voices," Joel Baptiste, one of the inmates, says about the book. "[We] have amazing stories if you're willing to look and listen." 128-G consists of scans of original artifacts from inside Calipatria - drawings on paper, napkins and other found materials, typed and handwritten letters, birthday cards, and powerful photos from filmmaker Danny Dwyer. All the material in 128-G come from Words Uncaged, a non-profit organization running art and writing programs in several California prisons. Visit www.wordsuncaged.org to learn more about the organization.

How does sleep--or its absence--change us? At the end of another wakeful night, High Winds tears off on a hallucinatory road trip in search of his estranged half brother, led by cryptic signs and coincidences. Part modern-day pillow book, part picture book for adults, and told in an associative, elliptical style, the narrative takes readers deep into a dreamlike Western landscape. Jessica Fleischmann's atmospheric imagery amplifies the words on every page, referencing 1980s graphics, net art, and something yet unseen; Sylvan Oswald's text inhabits and draws meaning from this visual environment. Gas stations, local legends, and unlikely rock formations become terrain for explorations of fear, fantasy, masculinity, medication, spatial structures, and bodily functions--inspired by the author's experience of gender transition, insomnia, and moving to Los Angeles. Poetic and funny, surreal and beautiful--High Winds makes a delightful companion, before or instead of a good night's sleep.

A bold statement for those living within the industrial prison complex, realized in block prints of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Inside prisons across the U.S., incarcerated people struggle everyday for their basic rights, claiming again and again their status as human beings. Here, within the largest democracy in the world (conditional though it may be), incarcerated people suffer indignities from terrible living conditions to physical and sexual violence, all under the aegis of justice. As a tool to discuss the limits and ideals of human rights within a carceral state, artists at Stateville Prison, who struggle daily for their own human rights, created block prints of each article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The process of drawing, carving, and inking each print created the time and space for artists to critique and reflect on the ways the declaration is simultaneously aspirational, strategic, and fraught with the legacy of the violence of its founding states. For universal human rights to be relevant, it is essential that the most impacted people be heard and their vision of human rights centered. This book features the 30 brilliantly crafted prints presented alongside the corresponding articles from the declaration. The artists and authors ask essential questions of what it means to build a culture of human rights from below rather than institute rights from above. What happens when people denied their rights, begin to reimagine and carve them out once again? This project was inspired by Meredith Stern's Universal Declaration of Human Rights print project and developed in a class taught by Aaron Hughes through the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project.