Making Art When ‘Lockdown’ Means Prison

How he managed to hide the piece, which is in the show, and then spirit it out of the prison, I don’t know. But the challenges can’t have been as great as those faced by another Fairton inmate, Jesse Krimes, who had the task of preserving a much larger work of his own.

Mr. Krimes had just graduated from college with an art degree in 2008 when he was arrested and sentenced to jail on a drug offense. (With few exceptions, Ms. Fleetwood steers clear of mentioning the specific reasons the artists in the show were incarcerated, presumably to avoid having their art read through the lens of criminality.) He quickly came to understand how psychologically damaging the prison environment could be, and knew that only a focus on art-making would save his sanity.

From this realization came what turned out to be a carceral magnum opus: a cinematically scaled, labor intensive heaven-and-hell landscape composed of images culled from newspapers, fashion glossies and art magazines, with all the images transfer-printed — using hair gel as a medium — onto more than three dozen prison-issued bedsheets. With the help of fellow inmates and cooperative guards, he was able, over three years, to mail the sheets, one at a time, out to friends. It was only after his release in 2014 that he got to see the panels united as a single work measuring 15 feet tall and 40 feet wide. He called it “Apokaluptein 16389067,” combining the Greek verb “to reveal” and his prison number.

No less ambitious in scale, though executed in much smaller increments, is a room-filling piece by Mark Loughney, who is in prison in Pennsylvania. Titled “Pyrrhic Defeat: A Visual Study of Mass Incarceration,” it’s a wraparound floor-to-ceiling installation of some 500 head-shot-style drawings of the artist’s prison mates. In the most recent depictions, done after the beginning of the pandemic, the sitters wear face masks.

As Ms. Fleetwood writes in her book, one of the calculated effects of incarceration is the breaking down of the prisoner’s sense of individuality and agency. Portraits, which are highly valued in prison communities, and self-portraits are an assertion of both.

A self-portrait by Mr. Loughney is an example: It’s part of the portrait ensemble but, done in bright blue ink, it also stands out. A painted self-portrait by the San Francisco artist Ronnie Goodman, who did time for burglary at San Quentin State Prison, is comparably self-defining. He depicts himself making prints in a prison workshop with his portraits of other inmates hanging on the wall behind him. (Released in 2016, Mr. Goodman died in one of the city’s homeless encampments earlier this year.)

Mr. Sell is one of several artists in the show involved in political activism while incarcerated. Another is Ojure Lutalo, arrested in 1975 while robbing a bank to gain funds for a Black revolutionary group. He spent much of his 22 years in isolation units where he produced hundreds of text-intensive collages protesting institutional racism. He is straightforward in calling his work “visual propaganda,” though not all the political art in the show is as bluntly instrumental.

In an outstanding contribution, James “Yaya” Hough — sentenced, at 17, to life without parole for murder, and released after 27 years in 2019 — fills two gallery walls with fantastically nightmarish line drawings of figures that shape-shift between male and female, punisher and punished.

Some of these works were made years after an inmate’s release, showing how the unsettling conditions of prison continued to shape their lives. In a 2018 video, “Ain’t I a Woman,” Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, who goes by the hip-hop name Isis Tha Saviour, re-enacts a traumatic event in her own past — she went through labor in prison while shackled to a stretcher — to address the historical subjugation of Black women. The video’s title is a quote from the abolitionist and former slave Sojourner Truth.

It is one of several works in the show that link mass incarceration to slavery. A painting by Jared Owens overlays a blueprint of a modern prison with an 18th-century diagram of a slave ship. Photographs by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick document notoriously brutal daily life at Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana, built on the site of a 19th-century cotton plantation.

Neither Mr. Calhoun nor Ms. McCormick has been incarcerated, nor have a few other artists Ms. Fleetwood has included, among them Sarah Bennett, Maria Gaspar, and Sable Elyse Smith. In that sense they’re coming to the subject from outside. Yet in their work the political and personal feel inseparable. And in the show, overall, inside and outside, guilt and innocence, perpetrator and victim feel like fluid concepts.

Ms. Smith’s art — sculpture, performance, poetry — is framed by the fact that her father began a life sentence for murder when she was 10. His subsequent absence — and, indirectly, the crime he was convicted of — have shaped her life and her growing and remarkable body of art.

The impetus for the exhibition itself had a similar source. Ms. Fleetwood’s longstanding interest in the inequities of the American prison system began with her own experience of having close male relatives serving long-term sentences. Her firsthand account of these realities, and their effect on her extended African-American family, forms the moving final chapter of her book.