Sable Elyse Smith’s “Backbend” (2019) on display at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. MAURICE CHAMMAH/THE MARSHALL PROJECT
By Maurice Chammah, The Marshall Project, August 12, 2023
At first glance, the “Federal Prison Inmate Activity Book” looks like something a child might get at a fast food restaurant. But then you see that the word search puzzle includes terms like “larceny” and “embezzle.” On another page, above drawings of a panda and a one-eyed snake, it reads, “With so many gangs in prison, it’s hard to keep track! Circle the tattoos that might be found on gang members.”
The booklet wasn’t published by a prison; it’s a cheeky collaboration between artist Daniel McCarthy Clifford and an incarcerated person he kept anonymous “to protect them from retaliation,” according to a display card at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in New York City. The center is currently showing “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” an exhibit curated by New York University professor Nicole Fleetwood. It has toured several museums since 2020 and is one of at least four exhibits in New York this year that feature artists with prison experiences, along with similar shows in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, New Mexico and Wisconsin.
Together, they suggest a renaissance — not of prison art, which is probably as old as prisons, but of its public reception. Americans seem collectively more eager to engage with this work, and to understand the processes and experiences behind it. The visual counterpart to the music I covered in collaboration with The New York Times last week, prison art can convey the experiences of confinement, trauma and redemption, in ways that transcend words alone.
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