New perspectives
State prison arts show comes to New London
Michael Iovieno spent 20 years of his life in Connecticut prisons after being convicted of first-degree sexual assault. He remembers his first 10 years behind bars trying to navigate prison life.
“I was just a run-of-the-mill inmate,” he says. “I wasn't really thinking about getting out, I was just trying to deal with the day-to-day stuff.”
That reality, though, turned around when Iovieno was admitted into Connecticut's prison arts program while serving time at Cheshire Correctional Institution in 1992.
“I started to change for the better,” he says, while looking on at a handful of abstract, colorful “cellphone-art” pieces he created for the Community Partners in Action's 40th annual Prison Arts Show, now on display through May 19 at the Gallery in New London's Garde Arts Center. “It gave me a way to connect with people who then saw me differently from a felon or a prisoner. They were looking at the art rather than the crime that I committed or the person they thought I was.”
“I started to see more worth in myself,” he continues. “And that maybe there is hope.”
Iovieno, 63, is one of thousands of inmates who have participated in and have been positively impacted by the prison art program since its inception in 1978. After his 2004 release, Iovieno has resettled in Maine and continues to create art as a form of solace.
Organized by Community Partners in Action, a state-run group that "focuses on behavioral change and advocates for criminal justice reform," the prison arts program similarly encourages inmate artists to create work that transcends their current realities.
According to the program's manager and head art instructor, Jeffrey Greene, the CPA prison arts program is a way to for inmates to reflect on their lives, consider themselves in a new light, learn how to respect others while also being able to take criticism, gain self-confidence and, most importantly, empathize.
“Empathy is the exact opposite of criminality,” Greene says. “If you can organize projects, activities and endeavors in the prison, they will provoke people to be responsible, to be disciplined, to be aware of themselves and aware of how they affect their surroundings and their environment.”
This year, Greene has worked with 227 inmates across a half-dozen weekly and bi-weekly art classes. Inmates must be discipline-free to get into the program (which boasts a lengthy waitlist of six months to three years), he says, and remain discipline-free to stay in.
A byproduct of that program is its annual arts exhibition, a show typically held each spring in either Hartford or New Haven. Besides acting as a place to dignify the good work and progress made by these artist inmates, the exhibition also provides a setting for families and the public to contemplate
these personal developments and the prison reform system at large.
This year's show, which displays over 560 pieces by 120 current and former inmates from throughout the state and New England, as well as New London, is being held in the Whaling City — the second time in its 40-year history.
“It was phenomenal then,” says Garde executive director Steve Sigel, who hosted the show the first time it came to town at the Garde's now non-existent Van Garde Gallery in the '80s. “You just don't find artists that live in the circumstances in the way these folks do, who create in this manner, and express and experience in a way that no one of us can really begin to imagine. It's extremely unique.”
“This (show) reminds everyone that we are all expressive social creatures and we all have worth and have something to say,” he says.
As to why the program is so important, Greene reasons that 90 percent or more of the state's current 13,500 inmate population "will become your neighbor again."
“Everywhere you go, there is always someone who has been in prison,” he says. “And with crime, you will always get this visceral reaction to it. But the way that they live now will profoundly affect the way they live and interact with the world in the future. For your own safety, and for the safety of your sons and daughters, you have to think about how they are being treated in prison.”
Change seen through art
In the sprawling art exhibit, hundreds of pieces — which represent a sizeable cross-section of experience levels, styles and subject matters, from realist to surrealist, abstract to meditative, contemplative to lighthearted — line the gallery walls from floor to ceiling. Considering that inmate artists are only allowed to work with pens, pencils, colored pencils, water color paints, yarn and pastels, the ingenuity of what they have created is striking.
Some works, as one would expect, depict life in prison. In a piece by James Pinder, inmates sit around a steel cafeteria table for Thanksgiving dinner — a slice of pumpkin pie references the holiday meal among otherwise undiscernible piles of food. A man placed in solitary confinement looks out from his cell window while prisoners eat and talk among themselves — giving an oft-unseen perspective into a life behind bars.
In another, Mark Despres plays out the day of his sentencing. A soon-tobe prisoner stands in metaphorical pieces in front of a sleeping judge, holding evidence that could exonerate him. His defense attorney waves a white flag. The prosecutor sits back, relaxed, his feet on the table, knowing he won the trial.
Other works are more lighthearted. A piece by Santos Cancel shows a baby cow kissing its mother, while drawings of cartoon characters such as Mario and Yoshi are marked by artist Thomas Connors as gifts for his sibling. A statement alongside the piece humbly says, “I hope that people find my work to be amazing.”
The intricacy of other works can be mind-bending, as is the case with Ryan Carpenter's sprawling “Lost Time,” a rendering of a magically dark and twisted woodland scene inhabited by sad teddy bears and a German Shephard leading the way for faceless bunny humanoids. Snakes conspicuously slither over tree branches while squirrels sip from a teacup.
“I tell them to think about making an artwork that spans from yourself to the moon. You'll deal with reality as you go along,” says Greene, whose creative outlook on the program must inspire inmates not only to think outside of their realities but also to work within the confines of a $40,000 budget allotted by the Department of Corrections to the program each year.
For new students, he'll often immediately task them with working on one piece alone for 100 hours. For others, he might ask them to imagine their own personal museum — what would that look like when they are 80 years old, he asks.
“Where will it be? Is it in the top drawer of the nightstand that was next to you in the bedroom of your childhood? Is it in the pocket of your daughter's coat? Is it in this huge reflective glass building in the backyard of the house you always fantasized you had?” he says.
“I want them to expand their boundaries and their horizons. I want them to be expansive in their thoughts. Most prisoners think of art as an idea that you put in the center of a piece of white paper. But art is so much more than that.” In this case, he says, “It's about making the inmates aware of themselves and their lives so they can't just be comatose, so they can't be in denial.”
More than a number
Besides the art itself, written statements accompanying some of the works are a testament to the many changes inmates experience within themselves while in the program. Many of them ask the viewer to reconsider preconceived notions of who a prisoner might be.
“We are more than just our numbers,” one inmate says. “We are thinking, dreaming and creative, which makes us human. Thank you for giving us a chance to show our humanity.”
In another statement, David Nieman writes, "Many don't know the pain these cold concrete walls inflict ... This is a place where the days are so lonely & the nights so cold. This is a place you feel cut from life, lost & forgotten . ... I found art three years ago & have since found peace & freedom, positivity & creativity & now look to draw my way to freedom."
“The world doesn't want to look at how complicated life can be, how complicated (these inmates') stories are," Greene says. "There is also this tendency to think that everyone in prison are homicidal maniacs, sexual predators, when every type of person is in prison."
“If you go through the whole show, you will become empathetic. You will see these people as a real living, breathing human being. You might realize that someone serving 45 years in prison might actually be loved. It will make you think the world is real complicated.”