From Ghana to Greece to Lakota Sioux Nation: Cultural Diversity in Arts in Corrections

The population of inmates and the correctional staff within a jail constitute a community of its own, albeit a transient one, and it’s also often a reflection of the community outside its walls. One such place is the Montgomery County Correctional Facility (MCCF) in Maryland. A maximum-security facility near Washington, D.C., MCCF houses 800 inmates with remarkable cultural diversity. This diversity reflects the demographics of Montgomery County, fortified by a surge in recent immigrants from 193 nations moving to the metropolitan D.C. area since 1990. Unlike Chicago or Los Angeles, however, this new immigrant population lacks any dominant country of origin; the largest single immigrant group, from El Salvador, comprises only a ten percent segment. Even more compelling is the fact that 87 percent of these newcomers bypass the city of Washington, D.C., to live instead in the surrounding suburbs, particularly in Montgomery County.[1] How these people are incorporated into our communities and how institutions respond to meet their needs is a challenge that must be addressed in many arenas, including correctional systems.

It is in the context of this unusual diversity that Project Youth ArtReach (PYA) of Class Acts Arts has been working for almost ten years to provide arts programming in several Maryland correctional facilities. Tapping into the wealth of artistic talent living or touring in the area, PYA seeks out professional artists to share their cultural heritage through visual, literary or performing arts. Working with some 40 artists, PYA offers both one-time performances and long-term, hands-on residencies to incarcerated people, primarily youthful offenders and women. Because the bulk of PYA programming is in MCCF, this essay will profile the work there.

Drawing on interviews with artists, inmates and correctional staff, this essay describes the successful integration of diverse, skills-based arts programs for offenders in correctional settings. By being made aware of distinct attributes of an artist’s culture, the inmate participants learn to recognize differences and commonalities among cultures. This type of educational exchange promotes respect and tolerance while teaching skills, and taps into the vast diversity within the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, incorporating artists from around the world, including Ghana, Bulgaria, Greece, Argentina, Brazil, the Lakota Sioux Nation and South Africa.

Participant in Project Youth ArtsReach puts finishing touches on an artwork. Click here to enlarge

The Montgomery County Correctional Facility opened in March 2003 as a state-of-the-art detention facility designed to house male and female inmates who are awaiting trial or sentencing, or have relatively short-term sentences (up to 18 months). Warden Robert Green of MCCF says, “There are 123 languages spoken in Montgomery County and our jail population reflects that, making this place fertile ground for delivering diverse arts programs.” The demographics of MCCF show an average of 55-57 percent African-American, African and Haitian inmates; 30-32 percent Latino (which includes inmates from Central and South America and the Caribbean); and one percent Asian. The rest are classified as “White,” although a large number of inmates self-identify as being of mixed heritage. Warden Green reports the inmates have a strong identity with family, neighborhood, community and/or school and yet lack fundamental “cultural competency.” Artists who work in the facility are most effective, he says, when “they clearly articulate the source of their artwork and their heritage — essentially the what and the why of their music, art or poetry.” According to Warden Green, the programs help relieve stress, teach lessons and allow for positive shared experiences among inmates. The PYA arts programs “have tremendous bang for the buck: they’re infomercials for cross-cultural understanding in a county that has seen rapid growth in its new immigrant population — and these immigrants arrive here from all over the globe.”

Music from Quebec

Back in the spring of 2004, Project Youth ArtReach had yet to earn the support of the correctional staff. At that time, Warden Green cautiously consented to a one-time performance arranged by Class Acts Arts for the youthful offenders by the Quebec band, Le Vent du Nord. His initial reaction to the suggestion was to point out, “We have no French inmates here at MCCF.” He was persuaded this was a high-caliber group of musicians who, while they sang in French, spoke English and played lively, infectious music. This program would “test the waters,” to see if the cultural arts programs from Class Acts Arts’ Project Youth Art Reach would be worthwhile for inmates and workable for staff. How would a group of Quebecois performers — playing strange instruments including spoons, bones, violin and hurdy-gurdy — connect with a group of 64 offenders, ages 15 — 21, most of whom were African-American, Latino or of mixed heritage?

The day of the performance, four inmates helped the musicians to set up on the two-tiered unit, moving tables and arranging rows of chairs on the lower level. As luck would have it (and an element of luck never hurts) one of the performers strapped on tap shoes and one of the inmates, surprised, asked why. “I step, I use my feet as a percussive instrument,” explained Benoit. To which the inmate replied, “No kidding! I go-go!” The ensuing performance and exchange — which included traditional songs of rural Quebec and a translation of each — was punctuated by a dance-off between the 50-year-old Quebec stepper and the 18-year-old dancer from D.C. Other inmates tried their hands at playing the instruments as the musicians spoke of learning music at their kitchen tables. The band was given a standing ovation, and the warden spoke to the inmates: “I have learned a valuable lesson today. I did not think you would like this music, and it seems you do! ”

The warden and staff were open and willing to try the program, there was inmate buy-in, the artists were genuine and talented, and the performance was one of mutual respect. This approach — plus careful planning — is the formula for successful programming.

Native American Storytelling

Native American storyteller Dovie Thomason, another artist working with Project Youth ArtReach, has had similar experiences. She tours internationally telling stories from her Lakota Sioux and Kiowa Apache traditions and from her adopted Iroquois heritage. Thomason says,

My culture, art form and curriculum are inextricably interwoven. Through story, I am introducing core values from my ancestors, which include respect for individual differences, good relationships within the community, social responsibility (over personal rights), self-control, perseverance and generosity.

Yet her stories are “non-preachy,” she says, which makes them accessible to audiences within correctional facilities. In fact, it is quite common for participants to proudly share with her that they have some Native American ancestry, though they are typically unsure which tribe.

Thomason will often share a story, then ask the listeners to weigh in: What was this story about? Who was right (there’s often debate)? What other paths might the characters have chosen? Once comfortable with her, the inmate participants are encouraged to ask questions and they do: Have you ever made a canoe? Do you have buckskins at home? What do think about the name “Redskins” for the football team? Do you feel victimized by the American government? These questions open a dialogue that gives Dovie the opportunity to respond to misconceptions about Native people and allows her, her people and culture to, as she says, “become real and multidimensional.”

Drumming from Ghana

One of the musicians who has an ongoing presence in the arts-in-corrections programs facilitated by PYA is Kwame Ansah-Brew, a master drummer from Ghana. Dressed in African garb, Ansah-Brew totes between 10 and 20 drums — primarily djembe — into the facilities. He begins his workshops in palm drumming with simple call-and-response exercises. Invariably, the participants are enthusiastic at the start but then their hands begin to tire. This is when he will take a break and begin to talk about Ghana, how the music is connected to life-cycle events, how it is used to motivate and keep rhythm while villagers plant yams or to praise God. Then the questions come: How did you learn English? Do you live in a hut? What is kente cloth used for? Do all Ghanaians smoke weed? This gives Ansah-Brew an opportunity to dispel myths and teach about Africans in general and Ghanaians in particular.

During one session at the jail, Ansah-Brew performed with his musician partner, Kofi Dennis, as the duo “Anansegromma.” An inmate told them how meaningful it was to hear the rhythms of their music because it took him “back to Jamaica,” his homeland. This opened up a discussion about the slave trade from Ghana to Jamaica, bridging African and Caribbean cultures. Ansah-Brew and Dennis then talked about how hip-hop, reggae and other musical genres have borrowed from Ghana. Their presentation, their “infomercial,” for the inmates was at once a window into a little-known culture and a link to pop culture.

Inmates say they enjoy the drumming because they “get to make noise and spontaneously dance.” One said. “We get to lead or freestyle, other times we have to listen and follow.”[2] Others spoke of learning about “occupational songs” from the Ivory Coast, songs that encourage teamwork. The supervisor on the unit, Bonnie Robinson, said the drumming workshops

…break down barriers between group of guys. The inmates exhibit discipline, respect, leadership. Someone who may have been shy gets up and dances, and then the other guys raise both their hands and sort of wave them up and down, rocking, nodding their heads, like bowing to him out of respect for his dance skills, if they’re impressed. I can only let 15 inmates participate at one time in the class, so another 35 — 45 are locked in their cells, but loud as it is, they’ve never complained. I think everyone likes hearing the rhythms.

Handmade in Greece

Visual arts programs work particularly well in correctional settings. One teaching veteran of jails is Maria Anasazi, a Greek-born sculptor who has taught mask making, book making and assorted small sculpture and mixed-media classes to both male and female inmates. While she feels “very Greek” and admits to being from a homogenous society (“you knew what everybody cooked on Sundays in their homes”), she never considers herself to be different in an “ethnocentric way.” Despite that, she says the youthful offenders don’t see her as a person of color, nor do they think of her as white. They think of her as “other,” as a kind of neutral. This allows her, along with her deep commitment to a project and an intense “cut the crap” manner, to get right down to the business of making art with her students. Her perspective allows her to admire many cultures and she communicates this to her students. If anything, she says, her roots are those of poverty, which led to making things by hand: “My father was a pastry maker and my mother sewed.” Participants are surprised to learn she has no TV and knows little about popular culture, and yet her ability and enthusiasm in crafting masks, hats and books by hand is by extension her cultural contribution to their learning.

Project Youth ArtsReach mural is unveiled at Northwood High School in Silver Spring, Md. ‘‘Panels of Hope” was created by young people in the county prison system. Beverly Kelly, mother of one of the artists, looks on. Photo by Laurie DeWitt⁄The Gazette Click here to enlarge

Affectionately dubbed the “fishbowl room” by the artists, the glass-walled multipurpose rooms are where the visual arts workshops at MCCF are held. They are located outside the unit dormitories where supplies, tightly controlled in this maximum-security detention center, are more easily accounted for. Some 10-12 inmates volunteer for any given series of workshops, which are held for 8-16 weeks, for one 2-3 hour afternoon session per week.

Working with the women’s unit, Anasazi’s recent residency focused on using the idea of clothing as a “form of identity.” The women (ages 16-65) first created small designs for flat-doll structures, using assorted fabric, buttons and other items; they then moved on to create larger pieces, the size and shapes of full skirts, integrating block printing, photos, textured cloth and other fabric. These pieces were meant to be a form of self-portrait. For example, one of the female inmates, from Guatemala, used green mesh to create a skirt, then tied onto it alternating rows of cloth roses and “thorns” to represent the beauty and pain in her life. [3]

Roots in South Africa

More than one inmate has expressed surprise when they learn Carien Quiroga is from South Africa because, they say, she is white. “I thought all Africans were black,” is something she has heard often inside correctional facilities. Quiroga gives her students a brief overview of the history of the continent, describing how much of Africa was “colonized” by whites. She talks gently about the suffering that went on in South Africa under apartheid and about many difficult issues regarding violence towards women, children and the environment in her native country. She shares with them images of her artwork, which addresses these issues of injustice. Also forming the basis for some of her personal sculptural work are themes of uprootedness and isolation as a new immigrant. Cultural deracination is familiar to many of the people with whom she works in Montgomery County, including inmates at the jail.

Quiroga leads workshops in mixed-media and mural arts, and encourages dialogue between the participants. One inmate said,

Where the artists are from, and what they’ve been through, is relevant; their environment, their belief. They share that and we can’t help but learn something from that. Carien talked about liberty and freedom and what that has meant in South Africa. Those are important themes to us, too. Now we’re working on a mural with her and it’s about unsung, everyday heroes. So we talked about what that means to each of us.

Bulgarian Poetry

More subtle, perhaps, are the poetry workshops with Bulgarian-born poet, Lyubomir Nikolov, who came to the United States almost 20 years ago. Nikolov senses some initial suspicion of him when he begins his classes inside the facilities: an unfamiliar accent, efficiency of words, strange language (he reads his poems in Bulgarian as well as in English, and writes some of the words on the board). In Bulgaria, riddles and proverbs are considered national treasures: expressing oneself in only a few words is considered an attribute. His love of language and his low-key manner tend to draw participants into conversation and encourage them to write. “When Lyubo reads his poems, it’s like music, it’s lyrical, the way it sounds. Even though I don’t understand [the Bulgarian language] the words, I feel the emotions of the poems,” said one of his workshop participants. Another poetry participant said, “I like the balance between culture and skill taught in the workshops.”

“Music and art are accessible to this population. Artists serve as role models when they talk about their heritage and say, essentially, ‘This is who I am, and I’m comfortable with who I am,’” according to the youthful offenders’ supervisor, Ms. Robinson.

Musical Journey through Latin America

A case in point is the duo Cantaré, with Cecilia Esquivel of Argentina and Patricia Vergara of Brazil. Their performances and music workshops, described as “a journey through Latin America,” incorporate guitar, charangos, berimbaus, plenas, keyboards and assorted rattles and drums. They sing, play and dance, teaching participants about folk traditions and the diverse sounds of Puerto Rico, Peru, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil. “We try to make the sessions feel like hanging at home with your buddies, so they lower barriers and try singing or playing a folk instrument or dancing with us. We clue them in to the fact that with much of Latino folk music, you don’t have to be a professional to join in,” says Esquivel. In one residency with the women’s unit, some Latinas who didn’t speak English learned a song in English while the English speakers learned songs in Spanish; this bi-lingual swap was the brainchild of the group, not the performers.

In a dialogue with inmates, Esquivel and Vergara talk about the history of slavery in South America and the integration of rhythms from Africa, Spain and indigenous people. Esquivel reports that sometimes the Latinos and African Americans in the group will remark on the animosity that often exists between blacks and Latinos, and question why that is, given their entwined history.

As one female inmate related: “People learn by traveling, by seeing new things, different things. We can’t travel, so the arts programs give that to us. When we meet these artists, we gain knowledge and understanding. It opens our minds. It breaks down prejudice.” A male participant stated: “When I heard that Latin band, I learned to differentiate sources of Latin American music. I liked a lot of the songs before but I never knew they were anything but Mexican.”

Myriad Diverse Performances

The one-time performances, held at least once per month for each of the two primary units targeted by Project Youth ArtReach at MCCF (male youthful offenders and women), engage more inmates than workshop settings and include staff and correctional officers. These one-hour performances are held either on unit or in the jail’s larger multipurpose room.

While the bulk of arts programming is in hands-on workshops, the performances allow for additional diversity of experiences with visiting artists. For example: Asian-American and Arab-American storytellers, music from Ecuador and El Salvador, stepping from African-American college traditions, excerpts from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” and a presentation from a group of Maasai from Kenya. One female inmate said, “The best performance, the one that had the greatest impact on me, was the Maasai troupe. Their agricultural traditions, their nonwesternized, fresh, different way of communicating really touched me. I felt a freedom, like a dream. I envied them their simple life. They were joyous.” Some facility staff have remarked on the shared positive experiences, and the buzz the performances can generate for a day or two or even a week.

Conclusion

The success of the Project Youth ArtReach programs could be attributed to the following principles, as suggested by a 19-year-old male inmate at MCCF:

The most important thing about the art classes is that the teacher must be a good artist. The second most important thing is for the artist to be a good person, someone we can connect to. And the third thing is, identity — where they are from and who they think they are.

In a supporting comment, this inmate’s supervisor says,

The MCCF inmate population is diverse, so diversity of artists gives everyone an assortment of perspectives. It can start conversations between guys, if one of them identifies with an artist, another guy might ask, ‘Oh — is that where you’re from?’ The artist can show them or teach them about a different culture but it’s still up to the inmate to truly grasp it.

While the success of Project Youth ArtReach programs owes much to working with highly competent artists, other important factors contribute to making the programs effective. These include well-planned and well-organized facilitation between artists and the facility’s wardens and managers, as carried out by PYA staff; dedicated fundraising efforts (some funding for arts programs at MCCF has come directly from the Montgomery County Council’s Community Grants); ongoing strategic planning and evaluation of PYA; and biannual artist trainings and recruitment sessions with PYA staff and relevant, knowledgeable speakers, such as juvenile-justice authorities, special-education researchers, gang-awareness specialists and arts-in-corrections consultant Grady Hillman.

The emphasis on integrating cultural diversity into the programming grew out of the mission of Class Acts Arts (founded in 1995) to bring high-quality, diverse arts performances to young audiences in schools and community centers in the greater Washington, D.C. area. By partnering with the Smithsonian’s Discovery Theatre, Class Acts Arts has developed an extended roster of local and touring artists. Project Youth ArtReach, launched in 2000, focuses on reaching high-risk populations of teens through hands-on workshops; PYA taps into the Class Acts Arts’ roster but also has a distinct roster which highlights visual and literary artists.

Key contributing factors to the success of PYA’s culturally diverse programming include:

1. We hire talented, professional, well-organized artists capable of conveying strong ties to their heritage and/or cultural traditions; artists are recruited from local and state arts councils, cultural centers, colleges (including community colleges), museums, galleries, libraries, neighborhood art shows or poetry readings.
2. The well-functioning structure within MCCF provides a safe, efficient environment in which to work; with clear expectations of inmate behavior and clear roles of staff and correctional officers, artists are expected to adhere to the structure of the facility and to respect and accept the dynamics (they are asked to avoid letting personal feelings about incarceration interfere with the delivery of programs).
3. Flexibility: If one thing doesn’t work, try another; no one program or curriculum will work for everyone every time (encourage feedback); asking participants — artists and inmates alike — to think outside their cultural boxes.
4. Keep the bar raised high: Expect focused, thoughtful, respectful participation. Incorporate audience participation into the performances as a means of sharing; Warden Green says, “Let the inmates see/touch/do; hearing information alone doesn’t work.”

At the heart of these methods, however, is the program’s commitment to multiculturalism as a way of engaging the inmates and to acknowledge and connect to the greater community’s cultural development.

According to Arlene Goldbard in “New Creative Community, The Art of Cultural Development”:

[R]eal [cultural] development consists in involving and drawing upon people’s own cultures, not imposing a standardized middle class culture. Today, individuals are inevitably multicultured; social mobility derives in part from mastery of multiple cultural vocabularies, not abandonment of one’s heritage (108).[4]

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2009-10, 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: Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Jan Cohen-Cruz, Imagining America; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; and Sonia BasSheva Mañjon, Wesleyan University.

Claire Schwadron is director of Project Youth ArtReach (PYA) of Class Acts Arts, Inc., Silver Spring, Maryland. PYA provides rigorous, skills-based instruction in the visual, literary and performing arts to court-involved youth in Maryland, each year reaching upwards of 2,500 participants in more than 400 workshops. Claire has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and taught art and photography in high schools in Chicago and Washington, D.C.