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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/art-inside/riding-pandemic-waves-art-time-covid/"></div>As of this writing, 49,169 people who are incarcerated in California’s state prisons have tested positive for COVID-19. This translates to more than half the total population of 94,848 testing positive for the virus since the start of the pandemic. Tragically, 215 of these individuals have perished from the virus in the past year.
Unfathomable waves of loss continue to unfurl in the wake of the virus, including illness, confinement, poverty, loneliness, and grief. Around the country, and the world, millions of people are confined to their homes to avoid the accelerating spread. The most fortunate among us are home with income and family, using spare time to bake bread, learn a language, or enjoy a movie marathon. Others are home alone or without work. Some are tragically homebound with abusers. One of the populations most drastically impacted by the pandemic are those confined to institutions, including prisons, where the contagion is most difficult to manage.
A year ago, I sat in my office on the campus of San Diego State University. I had been in that role for less than a year, so the office hadn’t yet acquired the comfort of familiarity. Like nearly everyone around the globe, I had been listening to the news, trying to understand the pandemic before it was named as such. I had spent many of the prior few days, and would spend more in the coming months, attending hastily called emergency meetings. The leadership at the university aimed to determine exactly how to continue operations while keeping students and faculty and staff safe, what it looked like to run a university in the midst of a global virus.
It was a Thursday — a date I won’t soon forget — March 12, 2020. I had about a dozen teachers heading to prisons across the state to teach art classes four days a week. Those who taught on Thursdays were likely just returning home. I had been trying to decide all day whether to continue our classes or pause them until we had clarity about the situation. Then I received an email stating the California State University was halting all non-essential travel. I still wasn’t sure what to do. What is essential? It’s a question many of us have asked ourselves more over the past year than perhaps ever in our lives. Was it essential to drive hundreds of miles to teach art in a prison? Was it essential to bring supplies to our team members who are incarcerated and leading their own arts classes after completing a teacher training? More broadly, was art essential? Was teaching? Was supporting students in prison?
I would argue emphatically yes to all the above.
Yet, having determined our task was essential, I asked myself, more profoundly, Is it safe? For our participants that are incarcerated? For our teachers? For the correctional staff? Could we perhaps unwittingly bring in a virus that could be devastating within the confined spaces of prisons? The question of safety was still difficult but clearer. No. It was not safe, not for anyone involved. The risk was too great. I sent an emergency email to all of our teachers and we started a phone tree follow up to be sure they got the information. We would halt our weekly arts classes on 17 yards in 11 prisons across the state as of March 13, 2020 until further notice. I remember with irony that I chose the word “pause,” a pause in programming. We are still paused. We might be paused for another year more. It is unclear. Like so much, it is unknown.
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<img class="size-large wp-image-15293 aligncenter" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/prison1-1024x963.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="602" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/prison1-1024x963.jpg 1024w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/prison1-300x282.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/prison1-768x722.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />
<h6 style="text-align: center;">The Cell; Roy Gilstrap/Gary Harrell; cardboard, acrylic, cloth, clay; 12x17x6.5.</h6>
But what is known is that, despite the incredibly high rates of COVID among the incarcerated population and those who work in the prisons, the arts are still, and perhaps more than ever, an essential activity. So, for me, the question immediately shifted to how? How might we teach in a distanced way? The answer was more complex than that faced by university faculty shifting to online education. As difficult as the shift to virtual teaching was for students and faculty — and I cannot overstate the challenges of it — the shift in the prisons was much starker. Students in our arts programs do not have internet access. They were not allowed to gather in small groups to learn from trained peers. Our only avenue for teaching was to mail lessons into the prisons. So we got busy figuring out how to translate our active in-person arts classes to paper lessons.
In the first weeks, we weren’t sure if funding would continue. Our colleagues at the California Arts Council advocated for the arts programming to continue and were given the green light by California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which has in recent years put an emphasis on rehabilitative programming and education. For those who haven’t taught in prisons, the layers of rules and regulations that it takes to teach a rehabilitative art class in prison are daunting. But, soon enough, our team began to navigate the emerging set of rules and complexities that governed sending distance learning packets into 11 institutions, each with its own set of rules and guidelines. Some allow a self addressed stamped envelope for the participants to send back their lessons; others do not. Some only allow metered mail (stamps can be a form of currency in prisons). Some would let us send directly to students while others required that we mail lessons to administrators who would review and deliver them. Each packet had to be emailed to staff for review ahead of sending. None of this was a surprise but all of it was new. On top of that, the correctional staff who supported us in approving and distributing these packets found themselves in an extremely difficult situation, many still on site in institutions with rising virus numbers and others, like our teachers, working remotely from homes with varying degrees of readiness to become offices, with children or grandparents or pets competing for attention.
<img class="wp-image-15292 size-full aligncenter" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/prison2.jpg" alt="" width="1199" height="1800" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/prison2.jpg 1199w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/prison2-200x300.jpg 200w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/prison2-768x1153.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/prison2-682x1024.jpg 682w" sizes="(max-width: 1199px) 100vw, 1199px" />
<h6 style="text-align: center;">Untitled portrait by Ronnie Goodman, charcoal, 2008.</h6>
I admit that our first packets were less than perfect. Each of our dedicated teachers did their best and our administrative team maneuvered the baroque set of regulations to send them, but we had never done this before. We forgot to add page numbers and some of the participants got lost reading the stack of lessons that arrived at their cells in manila envelopes. We hadn’t fully accounted for the fact that many of the participants have less than a high school education and distance learning is ultimately made up of words on paper. In those early days, we presumed that this might last until summer. Our teachers wrote out lessons to complete the numerous classes in visual art, yoga, and art appreciation that had been in progress across the multiple prison yards.
We sent them off and waited for feedback, which was a long time coming. By mid-summer, the mail started to trickle in at our university address. The participants’ gratitude that we “remembered them” was profuse, both heartwarming and tragic as it reminded us of their plight. It soon became clear that we needed to retool the lessons we had sent. We added more images and activities, included graphics to indicate which pages to send back, shortened the text, made word searches and puzzles for the vocabulary. We brainstormed how to help them to create a mindset for creative arts practices when they were in lock down in a prison during a pandemic. How, we wondered, might we encourage a reenactment of the safe space that is so vital to our in person classes for individuals locked in cells with a spreading virus?
This brings me back to the question: What is essential? Is art essential? Is it a good use of time, energy, and funding to make distance learning art packets to send to people imprisoned during a deadly pandemic? Again, I say emphatically, yes. Is it perfect? No. Is it an ideal art class or modality? No. Do we wish we could do better, connect with our students via Zoom or phone? Of course, even despite the new complications, it would make the classes more accessible. But this is what we have access to now, packets made collaboratively by a team of teachers and interns, printed and mailed with a small bag of art supplies (pencil and eraser, a few colored pencils, sometimes watercolors). This is what we can do. Is it helpful? Is it enough?
<img class="wp-image-15290 size-full aligncenter" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/prison3.jpg" alt="" width="1223" height="1557" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/prison3.jpg 1223w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/prison3-236x300.jpg 236w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/prison3-768x978.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/prison3-804x1024.jpg 804w" sizes="(max-width: 1223px) 100vw, 1223px" />
<h6 style="text-align: center;">My House; Roy Cortez, painting, CTF Soledad, 1994 (William James Association archives).</h6>
Art is an outlet. Art is expression. Art is communication. Both before and during this pandemic, art has been a means for all of our team, me included, and our participants who are incarcerated to connect — with ourselves, with one another, and, for our participants behind the walls, it was a also a vital connection with the outside. Even if each of those is limited, and the last drastically curtailed, the significance of the arts remains. Art connects us, even and maybe especially during a frightening time. It has now been one year since our &#8220;pause&#8221; on in person classes. Everyone is getting tired. Some team members have moved on. Happily, some of our participants have reached out to let us know that they were released.
Meanwhile, our skills and ingenuity at distance learning have improved. We have collaborated with colleagues across the state and nation, even across the world, to share ideas and hatch plans to make the distance learning packets the best they can be. Many teachers that used to guide students in person have learned to navigate a digital landscape, write how-to guides, determine copyrights, and more. We have sent in over 2000 packets to hundreds of people in the prisons. In addition, our team made a series of instructional videos in art and yoga that now play in all 33 California prisons. With the ingenuity of a new volunteer, we started a radio program that plays on KSPC so that our participants in the prisons in Chino can, if they happen to have access to a radio, listen to interviews with artists, writers, and musicians who, like themselves, were in prison but are now free. It felt like a sign that something was working when a student inside wrote that he had heard our radio show featuring an artist he had been in classes with in the prison who had released. He was inspired and hopeful to hear of this man’s transition.
The mail continues to expand, with more of the lesson responses coming back to us every day. Our participants send sketches from the lessons — such as posters about social issues, like bullying and recidivism — and their thoughts in response to reflection questions in each lesson. Sometimes, they include their own little sketches, a cartoon of a square faced man hopped up on coffee with the words “must draw,” a poignant pencil sketch of a cell, the artist’s only view day in, day out, or a funny face drawn on a feedback form. They share that they have learned the point where two parallel lines meet, how to draw an elephant, that contemporary art has heart and meaning. They reflect on their identity and reasons for making and teaching art. Is all of this essential? In a deadly pandemic, does it matter that someone can draw an elephant or interpret art? In a word, yes. One student shared, “Oftentimes, using our imagination and creativity, it would seem, is the only escape from our physical and social isolation.” Another said simply, “The experience made me feel like a part of something.” This might be the most essential role of art during a deadly pandemic.
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Top Image: View of my Cell; Anh &#8220;Ben&#8221; Nguyen, pencil drawing, 2014.
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All artwork photographed by Peter Merts.
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Riding Pandemic Waves: Art in the Time of COVID

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The Cell; Roy Gilstrap/Gary Harrell; cardboard, acrylic, cloth,

A mural painted by inmates, in an exercise yard at Pelican Bay S

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/art-inside/art-inside-dividing-line/"></div><h5 style="text-align: left;">Top image: drawing by Stan Hunter, 2017.</h5>
<h5 style="text-align: left;">All photos by Peter Merts, courtesy of <a href="http://www.artsincorrections.org/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://www.artsincorrections.org/', 'Arts in Corrections');">Arts in Corrections</a>.</h5>
It was the last day of our six-month art facilitator training program at a maximum-security prison for men. We were scheduled to have a graduation ceremony that week and everyone was excited. This particular program had begun with a deep sense of desperation. Ours was one of only a few programs at this prison and the library had been closed for months. The men sensed the lack. Interestingly, this was also the first prison in which I had a student in class that had attended the first school where I taught. Luis hadn’t been in my class, but meeting him here, talking about the same teachers and students, was both uplifting and deeply sad. I was glad to connect, but not here, in this place. My first year as a teacher was 1992, the year of the Los Angeles riots. Our school was located in the middle of deep unrest — fires and looting and anger. Luis and I each remembered that unforgettable school day when riots broke out around us.
This was also the prison where our class was interrupted more frequently than most. More than once, correctional officers entered and stated calmly, “All free people outside.” The phrase is raw and shocking out of context. It is surprising the first time you hear it inside, too, and then it becomes strangely familiar, a reminder: We are free. And they are not. When called to do so, we waited patiently outside the classroom as officers swooped across the prison yard. Our teachers coughed as tear gas tinged the air from the next yard over. We peeked in the windows of the classroom and waved at our students, who smiled and tried their best to make the situation less weird and awful than it was. I was relieved they were allowed to sit in their chairs. Sometimes the incarcerated population must lie face down on the ground if there is a disturbance in the institution.
<img class="wp-image-14312 size-large aligncenter" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/3-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="427" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/3-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/3-300x200.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/3-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />
<h5 style="text-align: center;">A mural painted by inmates, in an exercise yard at Pelican Bay State Prison.</h5>
When we were able to go back in the classroom, the students always apologized, as if there were anything they could do differently. They were sorry that we experienced this struggle, sorry that the stark line between us had been writ large for a time, sorry if any of our team felt afraid or nervous, sorry the class had been interrupted. I used to think it was odd that they apologized and brushed it off but then I have realized that it was the kind of apology you offer a dinner guest if something upsetting occurs. Even if it’s outside your house — a helicopter overhead or loud neighbor dog — you apologize. Even though they were captive here, this was their home and they wanted us to be comfortable.
From these challenging early days, the class had grown into a special opportunity to collaborate among creative peers in a highly restrictive space. At first, some of the men didn’t even know why they were in the class. Others thought they were going to learn guitar or poetry. Once we explained that they would learn to teach, many got nervous. But over time, the students had come together to help one another learn to develop lessons, teach a class, and most importantly, cultivate community. Now they had completed their 60-hour training, their challenging final project, and were ready to graduate. We worked with the institution to secure a space for the event. We invited members of the administration to attend and were thrilled that they allowed us to bring in cupcakes from a local store. It might sound trite, but in six years of programming in prisons, this was the first time that we had been allowed to bring in celebration cake from the outside. A few times before this, the institutions had supplied cakes or pies baked in their culinary services for our events, but it was special to bring one from a store.
The day before the ceremony, we gathered to prepare for the graduation. The students elected representatives to share portions of the art lessons they had taught to the group as their final project. We wanted them to demonstrate their abilities as artist facilitators. We practiced multiple times. Everyone was nervous but we were ready. In the hotel that evening, we signed the certificates, counting twice to be sure none were missing and double checking the spelling of each graduate’s name. We wrote to staff to ensure that the invitations had gone out to all the administration. And we drove to the market to get a specialty cake, piled high with sugary icing and decoration in the colors of our program logo. The front desk attendant let us store it in the hotel refrigerator.
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-14309 size-full" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/1.jpg" alt="" width="3000" height="1645" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/1.jpg 3000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/1-300x165.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/1-768x421.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/1-1024x561.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" />
<h5 style="text-align: center;">Painting by incarcerated artist in a visiting room at RJ Donovan State Prison.</h5>
The next day, we made our way through multiple prison gates and across the dusty yard to the visiting room where the graduation event would take place. The participants arrived shortly after we did, one by one, through a locked door on the side of the visiting room. An officer checked each one off a list and took his ID before he could enter. Everyone seemed cheerful and eager for the celebration to start and everyone helped get the room set up. Some men brought handmade posters they created for their lessons so we taped these to the windows to share their work. Others brought paintings and drawings, which we laid out on tables for guests and peers to review. We arranged the chairs in rows and laid a plastic baggie with markers and pencils on each chair in the back row, where our guests would sit. We were ready.
It was a Friday. I remember because Fridays are a day in which many prison staff wear red in honor of the military and our veterans. Right before we began, a group of prison administrators and staff arrived, right on time. Most were dressed in red polo shirts and slacks. The shirts were a shift from the typical khaki officer uniforms and dark suits on administrators. It was somehow more relaxed and cheerful. The group of staff was larger than had shown up at any of our previous events. It looked to be a great day.
I welcomed everyone to the event, explained our program, and introduced the participants that had been selected to teach a section of their class to show what everyone had learned. It was important to us that the guests participate in the projects. We wanted them to see that the men had learned to teach and experience the unity that comes with creativity. Ron started us off. He was a little nervous but proudly shared his lesson about adding shading to drawings. He invited the staff to take a pencil out of their bag to try it. A few did. Most did not. It was fine. He continued and everyone listened politely. The lesson went smoothly.
The next facilitator stood up. Angel was going to teach a project with colors. He asked the guests to get out two markers. When only a few followed along, he applied what we had learned in class about teaching and gamely encouraged the guests, his students for the moment, adding with enthusiasm, “There are no mistakes in art.”
At this point, one of the higher placed administrators raised his hand. A little nervously, Angel called on him. “Yes, I would like to say something,” the officer said loudly. He stood up. He was a tall and imposing man, even with the red shirt in place of a correctional uniform. “We aren’t going to do this,” he began. He cleared his throat and continued. “We aren’t going to use these colors. We aren’t going to draw these things with you. We are here, and that’s how we show our support, by showing up.”
It wasn’t necessary but seemed reasonable. We knew that, under normal class circumstances, the officers have a job to do and cannot participate in the class in any way. We had hoped that they might take part in this limited way as members of the audience but understood if they couldn’t. That’s when things turned. The officer did not sit down. He straightened and continued, “We’re over here, and you’re there. There is a line between us. It’s a line we can’t cross. That line divides us and keeps things safe.”
The room fell quiet. Poor Angel did his best to finish the mini-lesson after that. As a first-time teacher that had literally just finished his training program, it was a big ask to teach after that statement. It hurt that he had to do it but he met the challenge gracefully. I was glad that our next and last presenter was Jonah, a wry and witty creative writing teacher. I knew that he could handle facing this room filled with heartbreak. The division, the lack of humanity, we had worked so hard to ease throughout the class had been writ large by the officer’s comment. In that moment, the raw truth was exposed and it cut into the unity we had created. With full recognition of the pain elicited among the graduates in the room, Jonah taught a short lesson in poetry and throughout found ways to make everyone laugh. That laugh was good teaching. It showed his leadership and allowed everyone, staff and students, free and captive, to recognize our camaraderie. It erased the line. It brought us back together. I was proud, impressed, and moved.
Next on the schedule for the day was the distribution of certificates. Everyone in the room applauded as each man’s name was read. When it was over, we thanked everyone for coming and invited the guests and graduates to have cake. Our team donned plastic gloves to cut the cake. Not having done this before, we asked some of our participants to wear gloves and help pass cake to the guests. To our surprise, one after another, they demurred. One of them finally came up to me and quietly explained, “We want to help but you should give it to the staff. They won’t eat it if we give it to them.”
The cake had seemed like such an accomplishment when we were given permission to bring it. Now it only highlighted the separation further. We continued to pass the cake and most graduates ate some. They were much quieter than usual at a celebration like this but politely thanked us for the cake and congratulated the presenters. Most of the guests, in red shirts and khakis, a few in dresses and one or two in suits, graciously stayed to look at the art so carefully arranged on the tables. Not many took a piece of cake, even with our team passing it. But they enjoyed the artwork and posters and commented at the talent among the group. Most of them talked to one another and did not acknowledge the graduating students, who stood quietly several feet from the tables with the art. One or two of the guests asked to meet some of the artists to personally tell them that they liked their work. I was more than happy to make the introductions and appreciative of this gesture. But overall it was a strange afternoon.
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<h5 style="text-align: center;">Members of a Prison Arts Collective workshop at the California Institution for Men explore issues of identity through art.</h5>
Their graduation from the facilitator training had been a success but the officer’s comments had stripped something from it, cast a shadow on the event. He didn’t say anything untrue. Yes, the men were in prison. And yes, we knew that there were barriers and rules. But the class had offered a way out, a way for the men to see themselves as something other than a prisoner — as a man, an artist, a team member, as a teacher, as valuable. The day was a celebration of accomplishment and hard-won effort, not only of the content learned, but also of relationships formed and a sense of self rediscovered. Hearing those words, true or not, cast a pall on that accomplishment.
I always knew that, as soon as they left the space of the class, our bright, creative, dedicated, kind students returned to the cold reality of prison. I had visited their living quarters and chapels a few times but I had never heard the stark divide that marked them day in and day out articulated quite so bluntly in such a setting. I had experienced the line literally, from the side where I stood, when our students were strip-searched before class or, less distressingly, as our art supplies were dumped out and counted one by one, but this was different. I had not felt the invisible line quite so palpably or emotionally.
I knew that the officers had come to support the men and our program. I was pretty sure that the officer who spoke up had not meant any harm by the comment. I think, maybe, he felt that he was clearing the air, trying in his own way to be supportive. But that’s not what happened. When the staff left, the men seemed deflated. Some took it better than others. Jonah brushed it off. Everyone told Angel he had done a great job. But some of the men expressed their discouragement that these comments had been made.
“That’s how they are,” one said, resigned.
“That really changed things,” another shared.
“Why’d he have to say that?” Luis asked. It was a good question. Why exactly did that administrator, an officer who had all the power and control in the room without saying a word, feel compelled to express it verbally at that moment, rather than simply leave the baggie of art supplies quietly on the chair as other officers and staff had done. The psychological dividing line had been writ large and was impossible to un-see.
Prison might be the most extreme example but these lines between us exist throughout society. Our laws and institutional structures operate on assumptions that some people are more worthy or good or deserving of safety than others. This is wrong. This is not true. On a good day, I can see that this belief is based on bias, implicit or explicit, and long-adopted norms. On a clear day, I also see that it’s not that simple. Regardless, it’s time to change. It’s time to break down the barriers that mark some groups as “us” and others as “them” and see that we are and only ever have been we. It’s not just time — it’s long overdue.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-14311" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2.jpg" alt="" width="2799" height="2631" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2.jpg 2799w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2-300x282.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2-768x722.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2-1024x963.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 2799px) 100vw, 2799px" />
<h5 style="text-align: center;">&#8220;The Cell&#8221;; Roy Gilstrap/Gary Harrell; cardboard, acrylic, cloth, clay; 12x17x6.5</h5>
Back in 1992, when I was a new teacher, my students taught me so much in their youth, resilience, and wisdom. On that surreal day in early May, by 10:00 a.m., my third graders were saying “Huele humo” (“It smells of smoke”) as fires burned all around our school. Luis may have been in the class next to mine, or down the hall, a young student trying to understand why the city around him burned.
I am an optimist. I am hardwired to believe things will change for the better. But I no longer believe this will happen without radical rigor, and even with that it’s getter harder all the time to believe in change. It wasn’t fair for Angel to address that room after the painful division was demarcated. It isn’t okay that Luis, a bright kid in a poor neighborhood, and so many others like him lost their youth and their freedom. It isn’t right for those that have lived under this weight for so long to bear it alone.
It’s time for us to reimagine the way we consider one another, who is valuable and deserving. We have to redesign the way resources are distributed so that my third graders from back then, and all the others before and since, have the same access to books and laptops and art supplies as any other kid. We have to recreate the way we teach so that the first time a student learns about a black artist isn’t during March and the first time a student reads a feminist theorist isn’t in a women’s studies class. We have to reengineer the healthcare system so that the weight of a global pandemic doesn’t fall with such ferocity on the shoulders of individual doctors and nurses, and on communities of color. We have to remake the justice system so that the students in classes at prisons reflect society at large instead of being comprised overwhelmingly of people that are black and brown and poor.
It is incumbent on all of us to stop these invisible lines that divide us, from the concrete walls and metal gates to the more insidious barriers around our hearts and imaginations. We must stand up to demand and create change from the inside out. I see the crowds protesting injustice around the world today and I think, maybe this is it. Now is the time.
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Art Inside: Dividing Line

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Stan Hunter with his painting

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Full Circle: Freedom through Creative Community

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/arts-culture/art/art-inside-painted-windows/"></div><h6>Photos by Peter Merts, courtesy of the California Arts Council. <a href="http://www.artsincorrections.org/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://www.artsincorrections.org/', 'www.artsincorrections.org.');">www.artsincorrections.org.</a></h6>
I spent several days of this very hot summer visiting and teaching art in prisons across the state. From Fresno in Central California to Chino in the Inland Empire, down to Blythe on the border with Arizona and across the desert to Calipatria on the border with Mexico, many prisons are located in desolate places. Fields and farm stands surround some, while the most remote lie in the distant desert, nearly two hours past Palm Springs and 45 minutes from the nearest gas station. Arts in Corrections programs are located deep within layers of concrete and metal, through barbed wire and behind multiple gates guarded 24-7 by officers that slam and lock behind passersby. The location and structure mirror the distance and isolation of the individuals that live there, many for decades. Yet a kind of freedom is found — in makeshift classrooms, gyms, and dining halls — through creative arts.
On this trip, I was traveling south to teach classes and attend end-of-term certificate ceremonies with our Prison Arts Collective. I tend to teach my classes in correctional institutions over the summer when I’m not teaching on campus, which coincides with the hottest months; temperatures in Blythe and Calipatria reach 120 degrees on a regular basis. We come and go, yet I feel for those that live there, both in the institutions and in the community. I lead our Arts Facilitator Training, an intensive teacher education program to support incarcerated individuals with artistic skills to gain the theoretical and practical knowledge to lead classes for their peers. In the process, we have seen that students gain knowledge about themselves, society, education, and community development. I was inspired to lead this class from meeting so many men and women behind bars that have honed their artistic practices over the years and want to give back. I wanted to share the content that our teaching artists learn in college courses and in our training to empower participants to be leaders and mentors within the institution and support their personal development.
<img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-9337" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180927_6022e-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="427" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180927_6022e-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180927_6022e-300x200.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180927_6022e-768x512.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180927_6022e.jpg 1500w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />
What I love about this particular class is that students start out with something that they know well — drawing, painting, guitar, poetry — but rarely with any sense of themselves as mentors or leaders, and throughout the course gain the knowledge, confidence, empathy, and leadership abilities to effectively teach their art form to others. We talk about learning theory and art interpretation. Students reflect on why they want to teach and how they will guide those with different backgrounds and levels of artistic experience from their own. We practice cultivating a positive environment in which everyone feels heard and shares experiences, both positive and negative, from our own educational backgrounds. Prior to graduating and facilitating classes, participants must complete a final project. Like most students during finals, they are typically nervous. They assignment is to develop and teach a 15-minute lesson for their peers and us teachers. The lesson can be on any art form but must engage the students and include all three elements of our curriculum: art history or culture, creative practice, and reflection.
We have taught this class six times now and each time, students anticipate the final with eager and nervous excitement. Many have never spoken in front of a group before entering this class. For some, this has constituted their first positive experience in any classroom setting. On the day of the finals, we give the classroom over to the participants and ask them to lead us through their lessons. For at least six hours, they stand up, singly or in pairs, and take us through their planned lessons in guitar or creative writing, painting, or drawing. They often surprise themselves with their success in this endeavor. To allow time for everyone, these carefully timed lessons unfold in rapid succession, one after another, with 15 minutes for the lesson followed by five minutes of discussion before the next student gets a turn.
Over the summer, three groups completed their final projects. They presented to me, two members of our teaching team, and about 15 facilitators-in-training. In one room, we sat in old-fashioned school chairs, the kind with a wooden desk that attaches to the chair with a metal bar and curves around to the front. In another, we sat around table arranged to face the crowded front of the classroom. In the third, we arranged the desks in a U formation in front of a large window overlooking a cement patio and a dry mountain range. It’s nearly impossible to choose which of these innovative and hard-won lessons to share. Throughout, we were led through a history of choirs and a round of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat;” we stretched to find the correct finger placement on improvised guitars, the neck drawn on a sheet of paper with labeled strings, and experienced a few variations of the introductory drawing lesson, shading a sphere. We learned about the invention of postage stamps and were guided to create personalized stamps of our own. We wrote acrostic poems and haikus, reflected on memories, poetry, and art.
In one innovative lesson, a young man and former graffiti artist enthusiastically led us through a lesson on lettering. He shared that this art form celebrates freedom and style done at a necessarily fast pace. He shared images and led us through a step-by-step guide to make a dimensional and bubble shaped “G.” His encouraging approach and infectious enthusiasm spurred us along and I was surprised when mine came out with even a touch of the telltale pop and flare he was describing.
<img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-9338" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180927_6138e-1024x831.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="519" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180927_6138e-1024x831.jpg 1024w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180927_6138e-300x244.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180927_6138e-768x623.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180927_6138e.jpg 1232w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />
In another, a man that had been polite and friendly but somewhat quiet during class, shared a quote from Henry Moore about the definition of sculpture before directing us to find the image of Constantin Brancusi’s “The Kiss” in our art history reading. “We are going to make our own version, ‘The Smooch,’” he shared, to smiles and laughter. As he walked around to pass everyone a small, smooth bar of white soap, he gave a poignant metaphor about how, just like this soap, we can all change our paths or destinies. Soap is made for washing but we would turn it into sculpture.
Often, students co-teach the final project. At one point, two men stood in front of the class, a bit nervously, to lead a portrait lesson. The more outgoing of the two showed images of portraits copied from art history books, sharing that artists had made portraits since the beginning of time. The quieter man visibly gathered courage before speaking up and eloquently cites that the things we share — hopes and dreams, disappointments and heartaches — connect us. They asked us to think of someone important to us. We were to draw that person from memory and list five words to describe the person. As they passed out small pieces of paper and pencils, I thought about who I would draw and decided to sketch the image of an artist friend who had recently passed away. His memorial was scheduled in Los Angeles the night before these students’ graduation and I was leaving a day early to attend it. I had wanted to bring him to one of our classes behind walls and hadn’t ever had a chance. This was on my mind as I drew. I was so focused on attempting to capture my friend’s image and spirit that I truly became the student at that moment, a shifting of roles on many levels and one that I value.
<img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-9339" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180927_6117e-1024x690.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="431" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180927_6117e-1024x690.jpg 1024w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180927_6117e-300x202.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180927_6117e-768x518.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180927_6117e.jpg 1483w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />
Some lessons integrate rehabilitative skills that students have learned in other classes with the art and community building from our training. A pair of students planned to teach card making, a vital skill for those with little access to families and friends, and demonstrated how to draw a cartoon character (Winnie-the-Pooh) for their final, a first step to making a pop-up card to send to children, nieces, or nephews back home. Some students in our first Arts Facilitator Training applied what they had learned in a lifer’s group to their growing awareness of art and community to create a meaningful course in Creative Writing and Amends. They invite students to reflect on works of art and writing to build empathy and complete journal entries designed to help them to reframe past experiences and gain a new perspective. Another peer facilitator evolved what he learned about art interpretation into a fascinating class that invited his students to consider how interpretation — of events and actions and words — can change our understanding and point of view, deftly applying art criticism to valuable life skills.
Over the past year, this class has grown and our first peer facilitator graduates are now leading classes in poetry, drawing, music theory, painting, art history, and more. It is gratifying to visit the programs and see how they collaborate to cultivate a positive environment and support their students. In one recent session, a serious young man was leading a session in art appreciation. He is also taking college classes at the institution and had asked to borrow our art history book to develop his class. On the day I visited, he led a lesson about the Renaissance, sharing that it meant “rebirth.” They looked at images of art from the time period and then drew their understanding of rebirth. As they shared their drawings, each had independently tied the concept of rebirth to the new life that they will embark on after prison.
Another final project featured a landscape drawing. The pair leading it showed a landscape by Van Gogh and shared a bit of his biography before asking us to imagine a window. “You know how there are windows in our cells,” one of them began, “but they are painted over? Imagine that you scratched away a tiny square from that window and could peer through it. What landscape would you like to see?” This idea of a painted over window, with a tiny scratched out square, was moving. As I attempted to draw it, I noticed that the room had grown particularly quiet. I paused to look around. Fifteen students in prison-blue and two teaching artists, all in black, were bowed over their work, each lost in a distant memory or cherished dream, interconnected in the experience of re-envisioning and re-creating a sense of place.
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Art Inside: Painted Windows

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In Flight; Henry Frank (Hawk); Color Pencil &amp; Pen; 2014

Notes To Self; Gregory A. Coglianese; 2015; graphite, color penc

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/arts-culture/art/art-inside-art-contribute-restorative-justice/"></div><h5>Images by <a href="http://petermerts.com/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://petermerts.com/', 'Peter Merts');">Peter Merts</a> unless otherwise specified.</h5>
Eight-year-old B hid under the tables at any loud noise. If the classroom door slammed or the cabinet squeaked, he would leap up and crouch under his desk. On the rare occasions that he spoke, the soft monotone sound of his own voice seemed to startle him. This quiet boy, with a perennially downturned gaze and furtive eyes, was a student in my first class as a public school teacher. When his mother came to talk with me, she explained that she had brought her son here to the US to escape the war in El Salvador only to find another kind of war on the streets of Los Angeles. She and B lived next door to a house that served as a hub for a neighborhood gang and drug business. When I explained about the table hiding, she quietly volunteered her tragic story of intimate violence and trauma, observed by her son. It pains me still, more than two decades later, to think of this abuse and assault and the sensitive young boy crouching under a table while his mother endured it.
I was a young teacher just out of college and B’s story, though profound, was sadly not very unique among the narratives my young students carried with them. I didn’t know a lot but I knew from experience that art could transmute emotion. I gave B a journal and suggested that he draw in it whenever he wanted to express himself. To this day, my strongest memory of him is this lined composition book turned sketchbook. It was filled with page after page of open-mouthed figures, drawn with powerful dark pencil lines in a clear and confident hand. This near-silent and terrified boy found a voice through drawing and expressed himself powerfully.
My first year teaching coincided with the Los Angeles riots, which flared and burned directly around the school. Now my former students are in their late 20s, similar in age to most of the college students I currently teach. I haven’t seen B in all this time, but I imagine him having gone through high school and maybe to college, then into a job, utilizing his personal trauma as a source of strength to help others as a social worker or attorney or maybe to express truths about the human condition as an artist. While the optimist in me prevails and I still dream of happy endings for B and all the kids I taught, the realist in me sadly accrues evidence through the years of myriad ways in which the deck is stacked against so many kids like B.
¤
As greater awareness has built around the issue of mass incarceration, numerous groups and individuals around the nation have contributed — through dialogue and communications, programming and community building, lobbying and legal change — to seek and implement solutions to systemic injustices and oppressions. Over the past two years, I have had several opportunities to learn about these and to speak with people about the intersection of art and restorative justice. Our program holds panels to investigate this topic with leaders and practitioners in the field, including teaching artists, formerly incarcerated artists, and university students. These conversations explore the ways that the transformative power of the arts can impact and evolve individual and collective stories in the movement towards transforming the way we think about our embedded injustices in institutions.
Public education is one such system, one that I have worked in for nearly three decades. Several years ago, through a mutual friend, I met another artist and educator with a shared passion for expanding access to the arts. Artist Phung Huynh, now a professor of Art at Los Angeles Valley and the first chair of our Prison Arts Collective (PAC) Advisory Council, was part of a recent panel we held during the Freedom Festival on the campus of East Los Angeles City College. Huynh got at the core of the issue, stating: “There aren’t enough art programs. It has become a class divide, where people with money have access to art and art programs and those who don’t, don’t.”
Another panelist, Fabian Debora, once the longtime artist-in-residence at Homeboy Industries, who now teaches in prisons with the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, elaborated: “I believe that art is a universal language that needs to be reclaimed. Art is a language that allows homeboys and homegirls, the toughest of the toughest, to get into a vulnerable state. Art doesn’t speak and so it does not judge how vulnerable a person gets. Most importantly, it becomes a conversation, a dialogue that allows inmates to go back to their childhood to reclaim what was lost due to the impact of trauma. They can think about it, draw it, and then they can talk about it.”
The story of another panelist, Wendy, who took part in several programs in the arts while in prison, including our art classes, highlighted the ability of art to transform, transmute, and heal. Wendy shared, “As someone who found her bunkie hanging at 3:00 in the morning, art gave me a release and an area to go that kept me away from the cycle of the prison. Art was a space where I was allowed to find solitude and peace and relaxation. You can draw or paint, act or sing, and it can remove you from the realities of what prison is; anything that I did that healed me had to do with the arts. My goal is make mandatory arts in the prison system.”
<figure id="attachment_8937" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img class="size-large wp-image-8937" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/20150304_0635-1024x774.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="484" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/20150304_0635-1024x774.jpg 1024w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/20150304_0635-300x227.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/20150304_0635-768x581.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">In Flight, Henry Frank (Hawk), colored pencil and pen, 2014.</figcaption></figure>
Huynh added, “I can relate to the sense of art as a means of healing. I’m a refugee. My parents survived war and genocide but couldn’t talk to me about it. Art was a way of dealing with that; it is a way of making yourself visible. When I see participants in PAC classes smile and feel human, to be called a name instead of a number, that’s what it’s about.”
Of the ways that art can contribute to restorative justice, Debora added, “It’s a community effort; people always tend to blame mom and dad for the mess-ups of the child but the reality is that circumstances and the lack of opportunities where we come from are what influence some of the decisions that we make.” He expanded on how art can be integrated into healing and reintegration, “I’ve been a self-taught artist with no formal education. Art has given me a creative pathway and an opportunity to reclaim and exhibit my strengths, skills, and assets. As an artist, my responsibility is to continue to build these creative pathways [for others].”
One of our student interns, Alex, shares his thoughts on the intersections of art and the concept of crime as a community issue. In a panel we hosted at the Robert and Frances Fullerton Art Museum, Alex explained, “I was interested in the Prison Arts Collective because I do have many family members that struggle with incarceration and recidivism and I figured, if I can make a difference with the skills that I have, then why not do it? Art is a vehicle that allows people to discuss. I don’t think there’s any other subject or field like that, where it’s encouraged to disagree with one another and compromise and collaborate. Seeing that, and seeing our incarcerated participants talk to others that they wouldn’t have talked to otherwise, is really eye-opening to how thoughtful art is and what it offers.”
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More recently, I have taken this conversation behind the walls, asking incarcerated participants in our Arts Facilitator Training program what they see as the benefits and limitations of the arts in the realm of restorative justice.
I begin by asking if anyone knows what the term restorative justice means. As I have found with many terms and concepts that apply to a majority of our incarcerated population — at-risk, marginalized, limited access — a surprisingly few of them are familiar with the term. I start with the two or three hands that are raised. Typically, these are individuals that have learned the term in other programs, including Prison of Peace and Healing Dialogues in Action. They explain to the others that restorative justice sees crime not purely as an individual act but as an embedded community issue with an emphasis on healing for victims and the opportunity to make amends.
From here, we read a short text on the topic that comes from another prison program, the Victim Offender Education Group. It begins this way, “Restorative justice is a philosophy, a set of practices and a non-violent social movement.” The reading goes on to explain that restorative justice has a long history in indigenous cultures but is relatively new to the Western world, noting that it was utilized by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa at the end of apartheid.
I ask the participants whether art can be part of restorative justice and we chart their ideas. When I ask this question of an incarcerated population, I am genuinely interested in their responses; they have a knowledge base and insight that I don’t share and I am curious to know what they think about it. Most often, they are enthusiastic and share a multitude of ways that art contributes to restorative justice.
<figure id="attachment_8935" style="width: 480px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img class="size-full wp-image-8935" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/cba_chart-1.jpg" alt="" width="480" height="582" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/cba_chart-1.jpg 480w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/cba_chart-1-247x300.jpg 247w" sizes="(max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Image by author</figcaption></figure>
The prevailing response is typically, “family connections” and “connecting to community.” These are often followed by “art is therapeutic” and “art promotes healing.” Another response that comes up often is the way that “art brings people together” and “builds community” both inside the prison and outside. Several participants share that they donate art to charities to “give back” and send art home to friends and family members to have a positive way to contribute. Others speak about art as a positive means to “guide youth and the next generation.”
The subject of shame comes up often and, with it, identity and bias. Students mention that art is a means of “personal transformation” and a way to create a positive identity. Many speak of the way that others only see them as “bad” and continually associate them with their worst acts. They often share a passion to change misperceptions and stereotypes of those that are incarcerated through art.
I also ask where art falls short, how does it not meet the needs of restorative justice. That chart is generally much shorter but, on a recent visit, it inspired a spirited conversation. One student, A, argued passionately that art could not do anything for his victims, that “a pretty picture” does nothing to ease their suffering and does not make communities safer. The others listen respectfully but several rebut the idea. J shared that funds from sales of art from prison could be used to promote victim awareness and public safety. Others express the value of connections they have reformed through art, with families and communities. When I offer that art does not put victims and offenders in dialogue, a few students rebut this as well, sharing that they have used journaling to directly tackle forgiveness and write letters of amends.
<figure id="attachment_8936" style="width: 600px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img class="wp-image-8936" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/cba_chart-2.jpg" alt="" width="600" height="660" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/cba_chart-2.jpg 864w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/cba_chart-2-273x300.jpg 273w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/cba_chart-2-768x844.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Image by author</figcaption></figure>
In one peer-led class, a former student in our Arts Facilitator Training regularly leads his students through creative writing and journaling that builds empathy and promotes healing and understanding. In another of the peer-led classes that result from this training, the teacher guides students how to connect interpretation in art with interpretation in life, guiding them to consider alternate interpretations of events from interactions with correctional officers to phone calls with family members. These approaches to art even more specifically integrate the tools and principles of community building and personal healing inherent to restorative justice.
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I don’t know what happened to B but I did have an experience recently that reminded me of him and rattled my persistent optimism. I was visiting our peer-led art classes at one of the prisons when a student in the drawing class looked familiar. I have been teaching behind bars for the past five years so this is not uncommon, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember where I had met him. He was a tall but slightly stooped, as if apologizing for his height, a black man with a gentle smile and ambling gait. I continued to make my rounds to each of our peer-led classes, sitting in as the newly trained facilitators led classes in drawing and creative writing.
The next time I passed by the drawing class he was attending, the man asked softly, “So, you still teaching at the university?” I nodded and explained that I teach in the institutions during the summer. The question didn’t provide much of a clue about how I knew him since most of the incarcerated participants know I am a college professor. He said he was in my class so I asked if he had been in our class here but left early. The he added, “at the college” and I immediately remembered him as a student in one of my classes at the university. I got chills and sat down. I told him it was good to see him again but that I was sorry to see him here. I realized quickly that I had to slow down, choose my words carefully. I wanted to be supportive but it would be hurtful to show that it was heartbreakingly surreal to see him in this other setting.
We spoke briefly about the art class he took with me — neither of us recalls which specific course it was, but we remember the experience — it seems worlds away now and, at the same time, familiar. I remember him clearly as an earnest but quiet student that seemed nervous, as if uncertain or surprised to find himself in a college art class at all. He remembers it as the only art class he ever took.
<figure id="attachment_8938" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img class="size-large wp-image-8938" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/20151211_146-830x1024.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="790" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/20151211_146-830x1024.jpg 830w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/20151211_146-243x300.jpg 243w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/20151211_146-768x948.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Notes To Self, Gregory A. Coglianese, graphite and colored pencil, 2015.</figcaption></figure>
I tell him that I am glad he found the classes here and ask if he’ll be out soon. He shares that he has a long sentence, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I ask about his family and he says they haven’t been around, expressing with empathy that they are disappointed in him. “They’ll come around,” I offer, but really, what do I know? Many don’t. And maybe they did for years and then stopped. Or maybe they were never there or are part of the problem. There are as many scenarios as people and there are also institutional realities — poverty, the bail crisis, systemic biases — but in the here and now, there is a student, our shared memory, and the detailed drawing that he continues to work on the whole time we talk. He tells me that he is making it as a card to send to his daughter that is about to graduate.
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Art Inside: Does Art Contribute to Restorative Justice?

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/arts-culture/art/art-inside-dear-alice/"></div><h6>Header image: “Hope,” print by Alice Buckley. All other images of artwork by students in Alice’s classes in Detention and Dolores Mission. All images by author.</h6>
Everyone has their own opinions and views but I believe that art can be used to wash away our ignorance, greed, and hatred resulting in the cultivation of compassion, peace, and kindness. –Participant, Prison Arts Collective
This statement embodies why I became an artist. It is why I have dedicated so much of my career to shifting, altering, and ideally breaking the boundaries between those who have access to the healing and invigorating power of art and those who do not. But it might surprise you to learn where I heard these words. I was in the visiting area of a high security prison at the edge of California, near the border with Mexico. It was the final day of a six-month arts facilitator training that I teach to those that are incarcerated so that they can pass along their skills in the arts to their peers as mentors and teachers. The man that shared this thought was a student in our class and graduated that day.
His statement gets right to the heart of why art matters. Yet it’s so distant from what is often reported about the field of contemporary art — auctions and price points, museums and controversies — that it becomes something else. I think that the art he describes, the art that is a means to transform and express, heal and connect, gets closer to art in a larger sense, art that can be traced through time to the earliest humans.
People often ask how I came to be involved with art in prisons and I rarely have a good or ready answer. Our program participant&#8217;s comment gives shape to why I stay involved, but the reason I got involved to begin with goes back to my mother, Alice Buckley. About 20 years ago, after my father, her husband, passed away, and she retired from a successful real estate career, she began to volunteer to teach art to teens at Dolores Mission Alternative School in Boyle Heights. Her students had been removed from nearby public schools for their involvement with gangs, drugs, or truancy. She talked about how some folks she knew wondered why she would make the drive from her condominium in Hancock Park to East LA to teach kids that were often considered to be bad or problems; but that’s the thing, she never saw them that way. What she saw was people, kids, who had lives and stories and troubles all their own. She had a sense from her experience as a mother and as an artist that spending time creating — using the imagination and learning something new — was a valuable pursuit, and she was right. The kids came to love her and the art classes. A gentle sense of community formed around art.
Not long afterwards, Alice — or Miss Alice, as some called her — began to volunteer twice a week at Central Juvenile Hall with Catholic Detention Ministries. She would talk to kids, spend time with them, and really listen and engage. She didn’t give advice so much as provide a space for the kids to see aspects of themselves that they might not have recognized, their potential for empathy and imagination, their curiosity and courage. She would share books and stories and ask questions. Eventually, she started an art class here, too. We talked often about her work and I had the chance to go with her about a dozen or more times over the years. Usually, I went on holidays and would help her and other volunteers pass out small paper bags of chips and candy provided by the ministry. When we were done, she nearly always had one more stop, to drop off a book or drawing pad, something one of the kids had asked for or that she thought he or she would enjoy, so we would make additional trips to other units. She was always kind with the officers and often knew them by name. She would talk with the officers and ask if it was okay to drop off the extra item. She preferred to give it directly to the youth, so that she could check in and say hello, and they usually allowed her to do that.
<figure id="attachment_7539" style="width: 480px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img class="size-full wp-image-7539" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/face-printmaking_youth.jpeg" alt="" width="480" height="616" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/face-printmaking_youth.jpeg 480w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/face-printmaking_youth-234x300.jpeg 234w" sizes="(max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Untitled (Face), ink on paper, print</figcaption></figure>
I remember one time we visited and then went to deliver a book. The boy receiving it was in a room by himself and had not been allowed to attend the mass and celebration but they allowed her to bring him the book. We sat and talked with him for a few moments. He was about 14 and his family was in another state. Here he was locked up in California on Christmas, a kid alone. Mom saw this situation and that he needed a little attention and time. She listened to his sad story and asked quietly if he had been able to talk to his mother. They chatted for a bit before our time was up. He was clearly sad but smiled shyly and thanked her for the book and visit.
We live in a punitive society where it is easy for some to hear this tale and think, well, he did something to deserve to be there, or that he needs to be locked up, or something else to justify the sad fact of a kid alone in a cell on Christmas with no family. But, at 14, how much of what he did was pre-meditated and understood? What had he experienced or lacked that led to the incident? These vital questions form the murky and difficult territory that stumps researchers and institutions and leaves many Americans seeking safer ground in the black and white dichotomy of good and bad. Mom saw the gray area, she recognized the complexities and we would discuss them. I was fierier in my opinions and, as she did with the kids, she listened; while she stayed up to date on all the issues and laws, more so than most, she always chose to focus her energy on the children and circumstances — on finding ways to help and implementing them.
I am fortunate that my parents encouraged us to question and to recognize that the world is complex and layered. My siblings and I grew up with a big sign that my dad had asked an architect friend to draft for him that read simply: “THINK.” This is what art offers — potentiality, the transformative capacity of thought and imagination — and it is what mom offered, too. Through art, books, dialogue, and other means, she sought to expand the vistas of these kids on the edges, kids locked up or at risk of being locked up.
I have spent my whole life as an artist and received two degrees in the field. I have also taught art in various situations and overwhelmingly I have chosen to teach kids and teens and young adults in neighborhoods very similar to Boyle Heights. I value my education but I learned more about the power of art from my mom and from the many kids, teens, and adults I have had the pleasure of teaching over the years than I did in the classroom. In graduate school, I remember telling mom about this or that struggle I was having with some theoretical aspect of contemporary art and criticism. She would listen and encourage while continuing to quietly make her artwork and support the kids.
<figure id="attachment_7540" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img class="size-full wp-image-7540" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/excited_youth-art.jpeg" alt="" width="640" height="436" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/excited_youth-art.jpeg 640w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/excited_youth-art-300x204.jpeg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">“Excited,” ink and pastel drawing</figcaption></figure>
In 2013, as a new faculty member at California State University, San Bernardino, I got a call from the men’s prison in Chino asking about bringing an art program there. At the time, I didn’t hesitate to say, “Yes!” because I knew it was possible and important; my mom had shown me that. Not long afterwards, I visited the prison with a group of students and we set up an eight-week pilot art program that has since grown into the sprawling Prison Arts Collective, a large part of our Community-based Art project that facilitates dozens of college students and recent alumni in teaching weekly art classes to hundreds of incarcerated men and women in eight prisons throughout California. Currently, we are in the first year of a three-year contract with Arts in Corrections, an initiative of the California Arts Council and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that will expand the work to 12 prisons through 2020. The men and women in our classes tell us so often that art is the only space where they can feel free.
As our program grew, my mom asked about it and became a valuable mentor, sounding board, and supporter. On a few special days, she came with me to the prison in Chino. I was always eager to show her what we had created, but no one was more delighted to see her than the nearly 80 men in prison blues that watched this woman, through her late 70s and early 80s, walk across the vast prison yard, with barbed wire fences and a dirt track, to the gym. I remember that she was as free as if ambling through a garden, smiling and talking with our young teachers and with the officers. Once in the gym, she chatted about art with participants young and old. The first time she visited, one of the younger men recognized her, “Alice?” He remembered her from juvenile hall. Every time thereafter, she made a point to take time to talk with him whenever she visited. She supported our growing program in many ways, donating reams of colorful tissue paper for a craft class, purchasing art from our shows, and donating funds so that every incarcerated artist could receive a book from our exhibition.
I already knew that art could be a lifeline — it has saved me many times over the years — and I understood the power of images, words, and engaged dialogue to change and empower, to comfort and connect. But it was my mom that showed me both the why and the how of reaching into the tightest dark spaces with the particular light of art.
In the first hours of January 7, 2018, I held her hand as she slipped from this world. She was in a hospital bed, unconscious, after a brief and intense battle with the flu. What followed was heartbreak and searing pain. But something else came in the wake of her death, an outpouring of love and grief from so many walks of life. Of course our family and her friends grieved, but so many others share our pain. The day she died, because she passed in the early hours in that very long day, my siblings called our family and I made calls to others that loved her. I talked to a young man that she met in juvenile hall and had remained in touch with over the years, as he was transferred from facility to facility and eventually got out. “I am going to write a book and dedicate it to her,” he said through stifled tears, “because she brought me books and she believed in me.” I talked to current and former chaplains, a fellow volunteer, a woman that worked for and befriended her; I talked to artists from East LA whose work she had purchased and careers she had nurtured. I spoke and listened, in English and Spanish, and often through tears. It was beautiful and sad and comforting and we cried together.
When we shared news of her death at the prison she had visited with me, one of the men incarcerated there wrote what so many feel: “I always found Alice to be such a joy to be around. She spoke to my heart when she spoke. She was my grandmother, my mother, my friend. She always made me feel heard and that whatever I created artistically was special to her. This inspired me to dig deeper and to just be myself. I will do my best to give to others what Alice gave to me. This is the very essence of love and community.”
Inside a prison, the inmates and officers are typically on very different planes, so it has a special significance that a correctional officer responded with a similar tribute, writing, “From the first time Annie introduced Alice as her mom, I felt that I had a new mom as well. What a great example she has been for so many people, including me.”
As I sit and write this story, both an origin tale and a tribute, tears come and go across my cheeks. On the table next to me is a thick stack of letters and cards from prisons and detention halls, written by so many of the youth that mom met and remembered and corresponded with over the years; in some cases it seems that she the only person to do so. The letters are a testament to the power of connection and what we have the capacity to do when we choose to find ways to make a difference rather than reiterating all the things that are wrong with the world. I perused the letters and they all started in the same way: “Dear Alice, how are you?”
<figure id="attachment_7541" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img class="size-full wp-image-7541" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/to-alice_heart.jpeg" alt="" width="640" height="443" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/to-alice_heart.jpeg 640w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/to-alice_heart-300x208.jpeg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Untitled (Heart), pencil drawing on paper</figcaption></figure>
They ask after her family and wish her well. They thank her for writing, for remembering them, and often thank her for a fun or creative card that she sent. From there, they share what they are up to, as one does in a letter, and the array of human tragedy — isolation, fear, abuse, missing and broken families, loneliness — is relayed in handwritten words as calmly as if sharing the weather. Their directness is poignant, on the one hand, painfully communicating the normalcy of these traumas and, on the other, encapsulating a sweet testament to the caring bond she formed with each youth, ushering them gently towards the wellspring of hope through art, books, and words.
After updating her on his particularly heartbreaking story of incarceration, drugs, violence, more incarceration, a mental hospital, and blinding uncertainty, one boy shares bluntly, “Alice, I’m now crying. Well I hope you’d be able to write back.” Another boy writes that he can’t believe she saved the palm cross he made for her at Easter. I can, and it makes me smile. In fact, I saved it, too; the palm cross she kept with the letter is in my home now, nestled in the felt pocket of a fabric bear on a makeshift altar.
A girl from her art class became a pen pal and remembers that the class helped her to relax and relieve stress. Relaying a recent family struggle, the girl adds that, “Art is my coping skill. I try to keep myself busy drawing whenever I get free time.” Near the end, she asks in the letter, “I know it’s random, but will you be my mentor? I’d be honored if you’d guide me through life on the outs the way you have continued to guide me even while detained.” She also asks for stamps, saying that mom’s letters inspired her write to other kids that are locked up.
We never know the impact that our actions will have, the ripples our life will leave. I am grateful to have had a mother that inspired me and so many others in the vital art of cultivating compassion, peace, and kindness.
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Art Inside: Dear Alice

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/arts-culture/art/art-inside-teacher-training/"></div>It is 120 degrees outside, and yet the locals continue to tell us that this is a cool July. I stopped noticing the constant sheen of sweat shortly after we arrived for the second time here in Blythe, CA, near the Arizona border, over a week ago. I have come with a team to lead a class on the fundamentals of teaching art. In this case, the students — and future teachers — are men that are incarcerated in two prisons just outside the town. They will eventually teach their peers in the prisons. We are midway through the second 10-day session of a training that is designed to empower them to create community through the arts by sharing what they have learned, many while locked up, about painting, drawing, music, poetry, and more. The project is something I received a grant for from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to implement here, but months ago, as I wrote the grant application, bent over the computer in my cool office, I could never have imagined the depths to which our participants would go in engaging with this content and striving to understand, grow, and be successful. They are going to be incredible teachers. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/arts-culture/art/art-inside-teacher-training/#more-5451" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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Art Inside: Facilitator Training

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/arts-culture/art/art-inside-fieldnotes-4/"></div>Attending graduation, with all its traditional pomp and regalia, is a ritual I enjoy as a university professor. This year, I had the good fortune to celebrate more graduates from my department than ever before. Exciting as this was, there was another, smaller, graduation celebration that stands out in my mind. In June, together with three students who also graduated with BAs this year, I hosted a graduation at the prison in Chino for 11 students who completed the Yearlong Certificate in Art and Creative writing. These graduates did not receive a university diploma or celebrate their day with caps and gowns, dinners out, or even balloons and streamers. They walked across a makeshift concrete stage in prison-issue blues to receive their certificates. Those assembled to support them — teaching artists, volunteers, prison staff, and a precious few family members — sat together with the graduates in plastic chairs clustered under a metal awning in the visiting yard. Despite the humble surroundings, the celebration was as festive as any, and all the more laudatory for the effort that these men had put forward to complete this achievement. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/arts-culture/art/art-inside-fieldnotes-4/#more-5252" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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Art Inside: Graduation Day

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/arts-culture/art/art-inside-field-notes-3/"></div>“We are not going to change the whole world, but we can change ourselves and feel free as birds. We can be serene even in the midst of calamities and, by our serenity, make others more tranquil. Serenity is contagious.”
—Swami Satchitananda
When I entered the bright classroom, women of all ages were gathered around four rectangular tables. Most were dressed in requisite blue uniforms and some wore the optional muumuu, or as my grandmother used to call a similar garment, housedress. The energy was buzzing but each was focused on a bright square of paper in front of her, intently arranging petals in patterns. Strewn down the center of each table was a rainbow of flower petals, leaves, and seeds, both real and artificial. The women were collecting them to layer in colorful patterns on the sheets. They practiced creating their own designs while getting used to the new materials. Two teaching artists, dressed all in black to avoid any of the range of disallowed clothing — from jeans to all red or pink to khaki, anything that might resemble the garb of either inmates or guards from afar — moved around the tables like hummingbirds, shifting from one participant to another then hovering in place to assist or discuss. The atmosphere was more garden party or craft fair than prison. The women and the Community-based Art team collaborated to transform the space. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/arts-culture/art/art-inside-field-notes-3/#more-4391" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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Art Inside: Field Notes #3

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G. Lumumba Edwards

L to R: Henry Frank, Felix Lucero

Felix Lucero, block print

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/arts-culture/art/art-inside-fieldnotes-2/"></div>This is my first visit to our new program at this prison. I meet up with our teaching team in the expansive parking lot and we walk through a sea of cars to a small guard booth where an officer is sitting behind a Plexiglas screen. He greets us, already familiar with the four teachers that have visited for the past four weeks. They sign in, introduce me, and we are issued a key and alarm. The process is relatively easy, calm, and methodical. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/arts-culture/art/art-inside-fieldnotes-2/#more-4027" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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Art Inside: Fieldnotes #2

Annie Buckley is an artist, writer, and educator with an emphasis on art and social justice and the founder of the Prison Arts Collective. She is a freelance writer for a number of publications including&nbsp;Artforum.com,&nbsp;Art in America,&nbsp;Artillery,&nbsp;The Huffington Post,&nbsp;KCET Artbound, Art&amp;Education,&nbsp;and other publications. Buckley is the author of three works of fiction,&nbsp;Navigating Ghosts, Psychic Outlaws,&nbsp;and&nbsp;Mayday,&nbsp;published as part of multidisciplinary art projects, and several non-fiction books for youth on topics including racism, homelessness, and the arts, for education publishers.&nbsp;Buckley’s visual and participatory art has been included in numerous museum, gallery, and public exhibitions, including solo shows at Carl Berg Gallery and Jancar Gallery in Los Angeles and the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Florida, as part of Miami Basel 2014.&nbsp;Recent projects include an interdisciplinary text, image, and interactive piece, “The People’s Tarot” and the participatory art project, “Pollinating Kindness.” Buckley has earned numerous grants and awards, including Recognition by the California State Senate, Outstanding Professor of CSUSB in 2018-19, and grants from the NEA and the California Arts Council. As of August 2019, she is Director of the School of Art + Design at San Diego State University.

Annie Buckley

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