Interview with Artist Harrell Fletcher of the Prison Art Project at the Columbia River Correctional Institution
INSIDE>OUT ART interviewed Harrell Fletcher, Professor at Portland State University’s College of the Arts, about his work with the Columbia River Correctional Institution. The CRCI program, which is the subject of a new book, has a unique focus on conceptual art in a prison context:
IOA: Given how hard it can be to create traditional art in prison settings, it’s amazing that you came up with the idea to do conceptual art in prison settings. Tell us about how you worked with prisoners to get them thinking about and making concept-based art as opposed to object-based art.
HF: Well, a lot of the incarcerated people we were working with were interested in art, but they didn’t really know a lot about 20th-century art history. So conceptual art just wasn’t on their radar. First, we tried to create a conceptual context for them to understand the idea. We did slideshows, brought in artists, books, curators. It was sort of like… READ MORE
Interview with Artist Janie Paul, Co-Founder of the Exhibition of Artists in Michigan Prisons
INSIDE>OUT ART spoke with Dr. Janie Paul who is a painter, curator, and writer— as well as the senior curator and co-founder, along with her late husband Buzz Alexander, of the Exhibition of Artists in Michigan Prisons, now entering its 28th year. IOA and Dr. Paul discuss her new book, Making Art in Prison, Survival and Resistance.
IOA: You’ve dedicated 30 years of your life to working with incarcerated artists. What has it been like for you personally to experience the explosion of interest in prison art that has taken place. Did you ever picture there being huge foundation grants, New York Times feature articles, and exhibitions at MoMA-affiliated spaces and such?
JP: When we started back in the ‘90s not many people were talking about incarceration even —let alone the idea of art being made in prisons. The idea that politicians or people on the news would be… READ MORE
Interview with Dr. Clare Hammoor of the University of Denver’s Prison Arts Initiative
INSIDE>OUT ART spoke with Dr. Clare Hammoor, a collaborative theater-maker and Performance and Pedagogy Consultant for DU’s Prison Arts Initiative. His book, Sojourn: The Search, is a daily journal that he designed during the pandemic to help incarcerated artists working in various disciplines search inward as part of their creative process.
IOA: How did you start working with incarcerated individuals?
CH: I went to high school at a Franciscan catholic high school where a lot of nuns from around the country go to retire. A lot of them are powerful, progressive activist women who have lived their whole life that way. At school, I was able to meet an amazing nun, Sister Helen Prejean, who had written the book Dead Man Walking. That experience got me really turned on to death penalty abolition work, particularly. Then, when I was an undergrad, I got turned on to theater of the oppressed and thinking about how those things interact with each other. That brought me to New York City to do this work in a bigger way. READ MORE