Arts, Activism and Humanity – The Prison Creative Arts Project

The Prison Creative Arts Project is a volunteer organization dedicated to collaborating with incarcerated adults, incarcerated youth, urban youth and the formerly incarcerated, through building spaces of trust in which artistic expression, personal and communal empowerment can occur. We engender a sustained passion for the humanity of the citizens we work with by promoting their innate drive toward self-expression. Furthermore, our art informs the general public of the reality of the injustice imposed upon many of our society’s most marginalized individuals. I hope to present through personal experience PCAP’s efforts in giving voice to this often silenced community.

Some History

Incarceration is a burgeoning problem for the United States, and has become increasingly so since the 1980s. Tougher sentencing laws, especially in relation to nonviolent crimes, have led to more people being imprisoned for lengthier periods of time. As a result of this trend, although the United States represents only 5% of the world’s population, it now represents 25% of the world’s prison population. As of February 2008, more than one in 100 Americans is currently in prison (Aizenman). Only two years ago, that number was 1 in 136 (White). Supporting the booming prison population has necessitated an industrial-sized response. It costs the United States over $60 billion yearly to maintain its prison system (Slevin). Corrections facilities nationwide house over seven million people, with much of the focus placed on housing, as opposed to rehabilitating, the incarcerated.

The Prison Creative Arts Project, founded over 17 years ago by Buzz Alexander, starkly contrasts in both mission and method with the practices of the corrections system. Our focus is not on corrections, as a prison would define it, but self-redemption through art. Art is necessary for all, and should be accessible to all. Through art, we discover ourselves and each other, and the art of PCAP is grounded in allowing the voices of the incarcerated to be heard. In a society where the communities of the incarcerated are often considered an invisible, albeit costly, burden on the state, PCAP bears witness to their humanity and to their creative spirits.

At the micro level, what PCAP represents occurs through our immediate collaboration in writing, theater or arts workshops held in several adult and juvenile corrections facilities and urban high schools in the state of Michigan. Members of workshops include students and faculty of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as well as volunteers from the extended community and members of the incarcerated community who choose to come together with the shared goal of creating and understanding in tandem with each other. Our method is decentralized, and we stress the equality of all members of our workshops in the spaces we create together. The culmination of our collaboration, represented in the continuous body of original plays, poetry and visual art that we make, serves as a testimonial to the voices of the incarcerated, and we draw from this in our advocacy for their rights.

The PCAP Philosophy

To my mind, there are two concepts essential to the success of our organization and the work that it does. One of these is a belief in the liberating power of creativity. The work we create together is not only inherently beautiful, as all art is, but also powerfully honest and self-reflective. We celebrate each others’ vulnerabilities and strengths through making art and appreciating it. Most important, we believe that everyone has the capacity to create, no matter how we evaluate ourselves personally as artists. In making art together, we engage in a forum of acceptance — we learn to respect and grow out of understanding the value of each other and what we make. The art becomes a potent symbol for ownership: In places where individual worth and personal rights are so often unrecognized, something seemingly as small as a poem or a portrait gives back a humanity to its creator that (s)he may not have realized he still had, or was capable of.

Work by Michigan prisoner and PCAP workshop member Anthony James

This connects to the other component of our work, which lies in recognizing the equality of all people regardless of the circumstances or stigmas associated with them. PCAP was founded in order to support and empower the community of the incarcerated in Michigan, a population that has all been overlooked in general discourse, and if acknowledged at all, mostly in prejudicial terms. Our approach to the people we work with turns this pervasive misconception on its head — we volunteer in workshops because we are eager to experience and learn from the incarcerated as equals, not as superiors.

In keeping with this, we think of ourselves as facilitators, not teachers, in the workshop, moderating the atmosphere so that it might become a space of freedom rather than authority. The power dynamics that we are going against are inherent to the places in which we work: We enter and leave prisons as we please, we do not abide by the restrictions placed upon movement, interaction and thought that the incarcerated face everyday, and more often than not we come from places of relative socioeconomic liberty. For our collaborators in the prisons, juvenile centers and high schools that we go to, what is most important in terms of establishing trust is to know that these restrictions do not dominate the space. PCAP volunteers learn to be conscious of the power they wield within the artificial constructs of, for example, a windowless prison classroom, and divert that power away from themselves as individuals into the group as a whole.

Apart from our collaboration in workshops, we focus on outreach into the general community. Our aim is to effectively raise the public’s consciousness and engagement with the incarcerated — with those whom we believe have the same need for expression and right to justice as the rest of us. This takes on several forms, including our annually held Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners, student-led demonstrations and events championing the issues surrounding incarceration, and speakers’ bureaus revealing and explaining the phenomenon of incarceration and PCAP’s relation to it.

Portrait of an Arts Workshop

I worked with various partners for over a year facilitating an art workshop at the Southern Michigan Correctional Facility. When we first began, the men looked to us, the outsiders, as natural leaders, as teachers in a classroom. The first few weeks were crucial in dispelling that expectation of authority. My partner and I arranged the tables in a circle, so that everyone’s focal point would be across the room instead of towards the front. For the same reason, we sat in opposite parts of the circle, diverting the focus from the two of us to the distance between us, a distance which encompassed everyone else. We opened the space between us to dialogue, calling out to members from across the circle while we sketched or inked or painted. Within three weeks the classroom began to feel like a studio. Within a couple of months, it felt like a hang-out spot.

PCAP facilitators wield a vision of a dynamic and democratic workspace, one that invites questions instead of bringing answers. A workshop takes off once the other members realize this, and take on the power of leadership for themselves. In my own art workshop, veterans began to take on the role of facilitators, encouraging newer members by pointing out their strengths, showing them how to capitalize on what they already knew to achieve something that was a natural extension of their talents and personalities.

Four months after we first began, we held our first art show at Southern Michigan (“The Abstract Mind over Football: Are We Being Paid for This?” 17 September 2006). Our prison classroom, which became a studio, now became a gallery. We laid out the best of our work across our circle of tables, since we were not allowed to hang anything from the walls. Our audience, friends from within and outside the facility, walked around examining our work and then sat in a circle of chairs lined up against the walls. Then we introduced ourselves.

Al, our oldest member, called himself “just an old farm boy.” He liked to draw animals and rustic scenes of log cabins and farmhouses. He worked diligently with arthritic hands and colored pencils, favoring them over all other materials because, he said, they allowed him to be in control. He said that his perfectionism in his artwork, all tight lines and precise, naturalistic shading, came from his need to see things as they really were, not fogged up like his eyesight now was, nor fogged up like his past used to be. Kool Aid, in his 20s, explained his pencil drawing — a diamond sitting in a trashcan, inside a room with curving brick walls that enveloped the viewer — as a self-portrait representing his current condition. Shawn, in his 30s, said that he first came in because he wanted to learn how to draw portraits so he could draw one for his mother. He said he became frustrated, over the weeks, because he could not translate that vision onto paper, but on the other hand, he had learned to control watercolors, and was experimenting with the ways that he could combine water-based media with oil pastels.

At this point John, our most experienced artist, leaned over to Shawn and said, “You know, I was worried about you for a while. I could tell that you were going through some rough times, and I’m glad you stuck it through and stayed here.” John spent the first few of months of our workshop drawing pin-up models with exquisite accuracy in pencils, because, he said, “That’s what I liked.” His first challenge was prompted by my partner, who suggested that he try something he had never done before. He responded by switching to acrylic paints. By the time our next art show rolled around (“Getting into Character: An Artist’s Viewpoint,” 28 January 2007), he felt comfortable enough with paints to tackle statements. He stopped drawing models, and instead painted his own version of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” — a prison guard holding a ring of keys, and his wife clutching a wad of money. Behind them was not the sunny farmhouse but the shrouded bars of prison. The hands of men, all of them dark-skinned, grasped onto the bars, while the pale faces of the guard and his wife stared impassively at the viewer.

Ray, at the first show, recounted to the audience his words upon entering the room four months previously: “Are we being paid for this?” He was questioning the value of art, not just in a place such as prison, but in the world in general. Is it the price tag and the museum venue that define art? Or is it the technical skill? Ray was a musician, and said he could never even draw a fence. His expressiveness took the form of abstract explorations of color and texture, which to me seemed to evoke the jazz music he played. Although he insisted upon his ignorance of art, he would sketch layers upon layers of line that represented nothing less than his absolute curiosity for what a stick of charcoal or a pen could do when it was rubbed against paper. It was unbridled inventiveness that would never sell, and yet he was investing in the act of discovery, because the stick of charcoal was new to him, and the mark it made was original.

I cannot speak for everyone in my group, but I feel that the art we created there wasn’t important just because of what it was, but because of the process of creating it. The weeks upon weeks that we laughed and mused over our scribbles and questions infused our creations with our personalities. I remember every piece from our art shows because I remember how I became friends with each of the artists. They are bigger and richer than any of the flat pieces on the tables, and in the end, that was why each of us kept returning — to see each other and to talk.

The tough questions

“Are we being paid for this?” became a motto for my art group, an in-joke, and even became the title of our first show. It was a practical question as well as a theoretical one. In the discussion that followed Ray’s question, both in our first workshop and again at the art show, we felt the audacity of our work. For all practical and financial purposes, it would not support most of us. What were we aspiring to do? Who would be willing to invest in a painting that on first glance seemed naïve, untutored and perhaps even pointless? Who would be willing to invest in us, for that matter?

I see parallels between the stories created in the high schools, in the juvenile centers and in the prisons. They are extensions of a common circumstance, of growing up and reacting to marginal resources, to discrimination and to injustice. The majority of incarcerated citizens are people of color, predominantly African American. Racial minorities and economic minorities are overwhelmingly representative of the prison population, and are otherwise under-represented in social policies. Bearing witness to the hope and pain and intelligence of their artwork alters the perspective of the viewer. A “criminal” no longer can be seen as a “what,” “prisoner” is no longer an adequate definition, and we begin to understand the “why” of an individual. This is not easy to communicate, but this is exactly why such dialogue needs to be initiated. As I write this, I look forward to the Annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners, to be held for a 13th year running, this March 25 to April 9, 2008. Once again, we hope that it will give a face and a voice to the people who might otherwise exist only as statistics in the minds of the average citizen. We hope to continue exchanging and understanding each others’ stories.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art.  The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephanie Woodson, Arizona State University.

Geetha Iyer is an active volunteer member of the Prison Creative Arts Project. Over the past two years she has been involved in art and writing workshops in prisons and a theater workshop at a Detroit high school. She is currently working one-on-one with a youth at a juvenile facility, and has begun a new prison art workshop. A graduate of the University of Michigan, she hopes to apply the PCAP philosophy to a career in environmental education and community mobilization.

Works Cited

Aizenman, N.C. “Record-High Ratio of Americans in Prison.” Washington Post 28 January 2006.

White, E. “1 in 136 U.S. Residents Behind Bars.” Associated Press 22 May 2006.

Slevin, P. “U.S. Prison Study Faults System and the Public.” Washington Post 8 June 2006.

Original CAN/API publication: August 2008