Creativity, even on death row
Editor’s note: Molly Glentzer, the Chronicle’s ever-busy, nearly omnipresent arts writer, regularly posts examinations of singular art pieces on the Gray Matters website. Read more at houstonchronicle. com/local/graymatters/.
“Free Me”
The artist: Kevin Cooper Where: In “Windows on Death Row: Art from Inside and Outside the Prison Walls,” through July 31 at O’Kane Gallery, University of Houston-Downtown, 100 Main
Why: If you Google Kevin Cooper’s name, the first thing that pops up on the right side of the screen is “American mass murderer.” He has been on death row in San Quentin State Prison in California for decades. Cooper’s case has been in the news lately because his lawyers have asked for new DNA testing that could prove with more certainty than a previous test whether he’s innocent. Last month, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof called Cooper’s case “a microcosm of racial injustice in the United States” and “a national embarrassment.”
I didn’t know any of this when I first glanced at “Free Me.” I simply thought Cooper’s painting was the most passionate and evocative object in a show with an overwhelming amount of reading material to absorb.
I liked the intensity of the colors and the clean composition. The painting’s screaming subject looks younger than Cooper, and his teeth seem too perfect and white. But the emotion looks real, and gut-wrenching.
Of course, good art in a traditional sense isn’t really the point of this show. The organizers — political cartoonist Patrick Chappatte and journalist/filmmaker Anne-Frederique Widmann — wanted to stir up discussion about capital punishment and all the baggage it carries about morality, racism, politics and social justice.
They visited maximum-security prisons in four states (including Texas), built relationships with dozens of inmates and set up a death-row art workshop to assemble works by inmates. Working with curator Anne Hromadka, they also gathered editorial work from some of the nation’s best political cartoonists, including former Chronicle artist Nick Anderson. They compiled copious statistics that appear on graphics and recorded many interviews. It’s all accessible on the “Windows on Death Row” website as well as at the gallery.
For those who might be on the fence about capital punishment, this show offers convincing perspectives that it’s not working. But I was also interested in seeing what 21st-century prisoners are making as art, thinking about the drawings by incarcerated people that John and Dominique de Menil collected in the 20th century. They were deeply committed to civil rights but also intrigued by any kind of visionary or outsider artists — often obsessive-compulsive types who made good use of bare-bones materials such as colored pencils and plain paper or manila file folders.
Cooper’s not that kind of artist. He has a website (mainly to defend his case) that includes a gallery of more than 100 of his paintings, some of which are copies or near copies of famous works. He’s not a beginner, but he’s still learning.
Kenneth Reams, who has an eye for abstraction, might be the most sophisticated: His drawing “The Last Mile” turns a prison hallway into a stark, geometric study of bars and lines.
Arnold Prieto, who was executed at Huntsville in January 2015, was a heck of a draftsman.
A few of the other artists do produce works with the crude charm of visionaries, however, and sometimes they deliver their messages with biting humor. They’re big on text and comic-book influences. I could see Gary Cone’s crudely painted “Visiting Day: LWOP” hanging in a fancy gallery, and his “How to Lose a Year in Four Easy Steps” made me want to cry. (He was punished with a year in solitary confinement when guards found rotten apple juice in his cell, which is considered a kind of hooch alcohol.)