“How the artistic creation continues, that is, the fluorescence of the human spirit behind bars, remains an enigma, understood only to those who must create where there is little light.”
This statement by local poet Shaun T. Griffin accompanies an exhibit of painting and poetry by inmates of the Northern Nevada Correctional Center in Carson City. Griffin has worked with the inmates in a poetry workshop called Razor Wire, which is now in its 12th year. The exhibit is on display through June 30 in the Sturm Gallery at Truckee Meadows Community College.
“I continue to marvel at the quality of their work,” Griffin continues, “their stubborn refusal to create decorative art. What they write and paint is bone work, the etching of flesh to paper, to canvas. They write poetry and paint to carve from the depths of their experience some reason to stay alive.”
I can’t say I agree entirely with Griffin’s statement, because some of the works on display do seem purely decorative. A couple of watercolor paintings of rustic scenes and a cross-stitched depiction of a lighthouse could have come straight from a country craft fair, and the various tattoo-esque drawings full of skulls, snakes and menacing eyeballs could be dismissed as doodling.
But Griffin’s statement does succeed in highlighting the stark differences between the life of an inmate and the life of a person on the outside. For the inmates, even the least inspired art and poetry may be their only way out—a mental escape from their physical captivity.
Not surprisingly, many of the works on display feature women in various states of dress. There’s a portrait of Marilyn Monroe, the über-female of so many male fantasies. Nearby hangs a painting of a mostly naked woman lounging seductively on the edge of bathtub.
And yet so much of the work is reflective of their incarceration, rather than escapist.
In a poem titled “Our Recidivist,” Jimmy A. Lerner writes: “We cluster in our smug concrete cells / to sneer and jeer the latest prodigal / son about to rejoin / our convicted little circle of hell.” On the far end of wall, a pen and ink drawing by Ismael Santillanes, also titled “Our Recidivist,” depicts a man with his arms cuffed behind his back, his abnormally huge and detailed hands highlighting his loss of freedom.
And then there’s this segment of a poem by Theodore Mangano, titled “Cell Blocked (And Slipping)”: “A box in a box in a box / in a box. / I try to imagine the smallest box. / A clown / in a box. / I hum ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ / and try to guess on which note / you’d least expect me to spring. / But either way, / I’m in a box.”