San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Imagining freedom
Exhibits use art as a link between incarcerated people and the public.
Rahsaan Thomas is a busy man. A writer, community organizer and cohost of “Ear Hustle,” a Pulitzer Prizeand Peabody Awardnominated podcast, he’s also the cofounder of Prison Renaissance, an organization that uses the arts to “end cycles of incarceration” and create connections between the general public and incarcerated people.
Currently serving a sentence of 55 years to life at San Quentin State Prison, where he has been for almost 21 years, Thomas recently added a new title to his resume: art curator.
His exhibit is “Meet Us Quickly: Painting for Justice From Prison,” an online show hosted by the Museum of the African Diaspora that runs through March 31. It includes collage, linocut prints, ink drawings on paper and acrylic paintings, a total of 21 works by 12 artists, work that was created at San Quentin.
“Meet Us Quickly” joins other recent art shows by currently and formerly incarcerated artists, as well as activists and creatives on the outside. Though these shows have been in the making for years, the connected issues of policing and mass incarceration and the idea of prison reform are front of mind for many Americans in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in May, the summer of Black Lives Matter protests that followed, and the disproportionately devastating COVID19 outbreaks in prisons nationwide.
On a recent call, between automated interruptions reminding us that the call was being monitored and recorded, Thomas energetically professed his belief that art demonstrates a universal truth, that “no matter what I did or how you view me, there’s beauty inside me.”
Thomas cofounded Prison Renaissance along with Emile DeWeaver and Juan Meza, who were all incarcerated at San Quentin, after civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson spoke there. Stevenson talked about the idea of creating “proximity” to connect those who are incarcerated with those who are not.
With exhibits like “Meet Us Quickly,” the artworks are the link.
Proximity is about “breaking the stereotype of cartoonish, evil masterminds,” DeWeaver said. “The realization that we are just warehousing people, and some of these people are brilliant.”
Artist and activist jackie sumell began collaborating with incarcerated artists two decades ago. She first partnered with Herman Wallace, who spent 41 years in solitary confinement at Louisiana State Penitentiary (also known as Angola). They corresponded for over a decade, and sumell translated Wallace’s vision for a dream house into “The House That Herman Built,” a 3D model, CAD flythrough and installation currently on display at the San José Museum of Art. Tragically, Wallace died of liver cancer in 2013, just three days after being released.
After Wallace died, sumell revisited the thousands of letters they had exchanged and noticed how much he had written about plants, flowers and nature from the confines of concrete and steel.
“I wanted to uphold Herman’s life and legacy,” sumell told The Chronicle by phone. So she started building what she calls “Solitary Gardens.” These garden plots match the 6by9foot space of a solitary confinement cell, and plants can grow only in the space where humans can walk. The garden bed (walls and prison cell contents) is made of “revolutionary mortar,” as she calls it, a mixture of sugarcane, cotton, indigo and tobacco — crops sumell grows to convey the historical transition from chattel slavery into mass incarceration in the U.S.
The flowers and produce are selected by an incarcerated person in solitary confinement, who communicates with sumell and her volunteer team by phone and through letters.
An adaptation of sumell’s gardens was built on the UC Santa Cruz campus as part of “Barring Freedom,” a hybrid show that also includes the exhibit at the San José Museum of Art and an online series of conversations, songs and videos. The exhibit, which runs through April 25, was cocurated by doctoral
candidate Alexandra Moore and Rachel Nelson, the director of UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of Arts and Sciences.
With the garden at UC Santa Cruz, there were challenges transporting crops, so the “cell contents” were fabricated out of aluminum. Students and volunteers helped to prepare the site and install the garden, which overlooks the ocean.
Its gardener is Tim Young, who is currently on Death Row at San Quentin and whose case is in the California appellate court system.
Through a letter interview, Young began with “Revolutionary Greetings!” He details his experience contracting COVID19 over the summer — he is now a “long hauler” with lingering symptoms — and says that he never received treatment for the virus at San Quentin.
Regarding “Solitary Garden,” Young writes:
“When jackie selected me out of the 2.3 million prisoners there are in the United States to be the Solitary Gardener … I knew right then and there that I had hit the lottery!”
He describes the collaboration process:
“I was excited to have the opportunity to imagine being able to touch the soil and grow food, plants, flowers … I think I would be happy to even grow weeds. I have been in a cell for 21 years, and I have not held soil in my hands. … I’m in San Quentin, right next to San Francisco Bay, but I haven’t seen the ocean in all that time, either. I felt like jackie had offered me a window out of my cell.”
Many of Young’s letters can be read online through UC Santa Cruz’s IAS website. He views the garden project as a way to help people on the outside to imagine a country without prisons. He also wants to encourage people to see him.
“They are able to see my attempts to prove my innocence and the corruption that led to my conviction, as well as the conditions in San Quentin,” he writes.
To create “Apokaluptein 16389067,” Jesse Krimes worked 10 to 12 hours a day for three years straight while incarcerated at FCI Fairton in New Jersey. For this piece, made on 39 bedsheets, Krimes transferred images from print issues of the New York Times using hair gel and a plastic spoon. The sheets were smuggled out of prison one at a time.
Together, they form a triptych mural that’s 15 feet tall by 40 feet wide and depicts heaven, earth and hell, inspired by Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” which Krimes was reading at the time. Krimes made the center register of 13 sheets, which he refers to as the “earth” panel, before deciding to make the heaven and hell panels, to “accurately reflect these philosophical ideas that I was working through,” he said.
It wasn’t until Krimes was released from prison in 2013 that he was able to see all 39 pieces laid out.
Krimes said seeing it for the first time made him feel like he “made it through intact.” And that a system “specifically designed to destroy me had not. That I was able to hold onto something and maintain my sanity and maintain my sense of self and dignity.”
“Apokaluptein 16389067” is on view at MoMA PS1 in New York City, in a room with a curved wall custombuilt for the enormous work, as part of the exhibit “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” which runs through April 4.
The show is curated by Nicole R. Fleetwood, an American studies and art history professor at Rutgers UniversityNew Brunswick, and it features work from artists across the “carceral landscape,” as she calls it.
In her 2020 book by that name, Fleetwood introduces the idea of “carceral aesthetics,” or “the production of art under the conditions of unfreedom; it involves the creative use of penal space, time, and matter.”
She writes that making art in prisons is informed by the constraints of the location in which it is made, the ways in which time moves for those who are imprisoned, and the materials made
detailed “San Quentin Arts in Corrections Art Studio” depicts the artist at work while incarcerated.
Goodman died just before the New York Museum of Modern Art PS1 featured his work in “Marking Time,” an exhibit that opened in September. He had been living unhoused in the Mission District.
Sable Elyse Smith: “Pivot I,” one of Sable Elyse Smith’s works in “Marking Time,” is a large sculpture made out of reconfigured, 1to1 replicas of the furniture in prison visiting rooms. Smith, an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator, is interested in these rooms, seeing them as spaces that thematically contradict themselves, both free and hyperregulated.