Imprisoned visions

Given that prisoners are an increasingly large part of the United States’ population, it’s only fitting that the art they create offers a stark, but not bland, image of arguably the most systematically brutal sector of American society. The volunteers of the Wisconsin Books To Prisoners Project, coordinated through Madison’s Rainbow Bookstore, know something of prisoners’ yearning to maintain some kind of healthy inner life. The group’s recently been at odds with the Wisconsin Department Of Corrections, which it says is hampering its efforts to send inmates the books they can’t find in prison libraries, from nature guides to African-American-studies texts. Not surprisingly, the art WBTP recently gathered from prisoners and from the non-incarcerated artists of Milwaukee’s Just Seeds collective brings a bluntly political focus to its upcoming art show, Artists Against The Prison-Industrial Complex. Before the show’s opening this Friday at the Project Lodge, one of its organizers (who asked not to be named) discussed some of the work with Decider.

FROM PRISONERS


Tommy Silverstein
“I think it’s really significant that he’s done, basically, pictures of walls and doors with such accuracy. So few people really have a sense of what the interiors of prisons look like. One of the things we’re going to do at the show—we had hoped to create a full-scale model of a Supermax cell, which is pretty much 6 by 9 feet, typically, but we are going to do something on the floor with tape so people can get an idea what that looks like.”

La Ron McKinley-Bey
“He’s been in solitary confinement since Supermax opened up—the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility, that’s the real name for it. He did all of these with the inside of a ballpoint pen—you know, the refill. They’re not allowed to have anything other than the refills of pens.”

J. Shomo
“It’s not political work, and that’s what we were sort of collecting in specific for this show. He sent this to us in gratitude for our project, and his situation was very interesting. He had written, asking us for a book with pictures of birds, and the only thing we had in our library at that time was a children’s book that included pictures of birds. It was not in very good condition, it was used. So he was denied the children’s book. When we heard about that, we went out of our way to get a brand-new field guide to birds, and that did go through. About a month later, we got these extraordinary pencil drawings of birds.”

FROM JUST SEEDS


Brandon Bauer
“Wisconsin ranks right now as the highest racial disparity [in prison] in the United States. I think it’s hard for [prisoners] to have any sense, necessarily, of what’s going on in other states, although many of them are very well-read. They probably know. Word trickles around very quickly. The grapevine in prisons is phenomenal."

Andalusia Knoll
“The circulation of this single [slave-ship graphic at the bottom of the poster] in England at the end of the 18th century was what mobilized [the abolitionist movement]…. I’m not sure if [the prison image] is just a blueprint or if it’s an actual prison… but it was Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the ultimate control of the state, where you have cellblocks that are situated like spokes on a wheel, and at the hub is the prison guard, who can look down every corridor, and just keep an eye on what’s going on in the prison. Michel Foucault considers this the pinnacle of the control of the state.”

Josh MacPhee
“I think he’s trying to draw attention between some of the United States’ policies and incarceration. Sometimes very simple information is easier to read, and of course, he’s obviously thinking very graphically about these images, the stripes turning into bars.”

Kevin Caplicki
"This was one that was very appreciated [among inmates]. People in prison are very clear on the recycling of the whole prison population. Ninety percent of the people in prison will get out. Two-thirds of them will be back in. One-third of them will be back in surveillance by the state, on parole, or in jail, I think the statistics are, within three months."