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Prisoners release through art exhibit
By Brent Hallenbeck
Free Press Staff Writer
JOHNSON
-- The spread Tuesday afternoon outside the Julian Scott Gallery was
just a little different from the finger foods you might normally find
at an opening reception for an art exhibit.
Instead of fragile
delicacies with hard-to-pronounce names, this table displayed comfort
food, or at least, food that provides as much comfort as any food can
when you're locked up: "Bologna on White and Wheat Bread," "State
Prison Peanut Butter on White Bread" and, for a little variety,
"Federal Prisons Peanut Butter on Wheat Bread."
If you came to this reception that promised "authentic prison cuisine" and expected bread and water, you weren't far off.
The set up was a funny send-up of pretentious art-gallery grub, but the
art inside the Johnson State College gallery was serious business. Each
piece on display was made by prisoners.
The exhibition is the
work of the Prisons Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to
promoting arts and education in prison and alternatives to
incarceration. The Washington, D.C., group is displaying the paintings,
drawings and crafts in Johnson through Saturday. None of the works is
by a Vermont prisoner.
While the organization is 2 years old,
the arts division was only established in September. Omar Bandar, arts
director for Prisons Foundation, said a goal of the program is to
"humanize the inmates."
Bandar should know. He spent 11 months
in a Massachusetts jail for possessing a firearm without a license. He
remembers being subjected to strip searches "at the snap of a finger."
If a prisoner balked, he was reprimanded, Bandar said, but would
eventually endure a strip search, anyway.
"In stripping your clothes," Bandar, 26, said, "you're also stripping your humanity."
That sort of metaphor is represented on the gallery walls this week. A
few pieces -- portraits of Albert Einstein and Elvis Presley, for
instance -- are simple works with no apparent dual meaning. Others,
however, convey the emotional effects of prison in subtle and
not-so-subtle ways.
A work by a prisoner in Iowa named Russell
Luncsford, titled "Garbage," depicts a skeleton wearing prison stripes
and heaped in a trash bin. That work, Bandar said, shows how inmates
feel when the system does not provide them with tools to better
themselves.
One of the starkest works, by a 67-year-old Nevada
inmate named Richard Hinger, simply shows a disembodied finger. His
description accompanying the painting reads, "I'm mailing myself out of
here a piece at a time."
Johnson State freshman David McMahon
said he enjoyed the food offerings -- he compared the spread favorably
with those by the on-campus food provider -- and also enjoyed the art.
He was especially struck by works by a 53-year-old New Jersey inmate
named Larry Walker, who drew bucolic scenes of ponds and trees on
envelopes he sent to Bandar.
McMahon said it's obvious how
freeing the artwork is for the inmates. "It's a roomful of release,"
said McMahon, 18, of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "It's very nice."
Fellow student Nancy Lange, 61, sees the value of such a release. She
volunteered at a prison when she lived in New York state, and knows how
important it is for inmates to feel they're doing something positive.
"The sense of self is robbed from people completely," said Lange, a junior from East Calais.
For anyone who thinks art sounds like a luxury for men and women being
punished for crimes against society, Bandar has a message.
"For the most part, they are going to come out again," Bandar said, "and how do you want them to view themselves?"
If you go
WHAT: Prison Arts and Crafts Show, presented by the Prisons Foundation
WHEN: 9 a.m.-6 p.m. today and Friday, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday
WHERE: Julian Scott Gallery, Dibden Center for the Arts, Johnson State College
ADMISSION: Free. The artwork is for sale with proceeds to benefit the prisoners and the foundation
INFORMATION: Call (202)393-1511 or visit www.prisonsfoundation.org.
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenb@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com
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