The Prison Arts Project Blog

In June of 2010 William James Association received the ChangeMaker Award from San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts. The Award “celebrates artists and organizations making a profound impact in the world… who inspire collaboration; embrace experimentation, integrity, and evolution; and encourage civic and community exchange and engagement.”

Prison/Culture, published by City Lights in 2010, investigates the culture of incarceration as an integral part of the American experience through a compilation of stunning and often heartrending art by inmates and other artists. It features text about the William James Association and the San Quentin Art Program and images of artwork by San Quentin artists.

Participants in the San Quentin Arts Program have produced anthologies, plays, paintings and prints, as well as musical compositions, which have been rendered for institutional as well as public engagement wherever possible. Working with the Marin Shakespeare Company, San Quentin Theater Arts participants have produced and performed three plays over the past 3 years: Romeo and Juliet (2010), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2009), and Much Ado About Nothing (2008). In the June 2010 performance, 10 inmates along with 5 other non-inmate actors performed William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to an audience of approximately 200 hundred other inmates, prison staff and volunteers, news reporters and outside guests.

Brothers in Pen is the name of the creative writing group, the members have produced three anthologies: “Brothers in Pen,” “A Means of Escape,” and “Tragedy, Struggle and Hope,” highlighting the talents, through the written word, of the men of San Quentin. In the latter, Tobias Wolff (This Boy’s Life) contributed the foreword.

The painting and printing classes have produced works of art in a diversity media.
Several prints have been accepted for inclusion in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress, including Blocks Off the Block, a 2010 edition of 35 hand-bound and hand-printed books of original linocut prints. The Tower Book was awarded the blue ribbon at the 2009 Marin County Fair Fine Art Exhibit. A collaborative piece on censorship, “Ill of Rights,” created by SQ printmakers and printed at SF Center for the Book’s ROADWORKS: Steamroller Prints in 2008, was selected for the County Fair Fine Art Exhibit.

In 2009, the Dalai Lama recognized SQ Artist Facilitator Steve Emrick as an Unsung Hero of Compassion. Presented to “individuals who, through their loving kindness and service to others, have made their communities and our world a better place,” Steve received this honor for his lifelong work in providing meaningful arts experiences in correctional facilities.

In 2009, Peter Merts’ Slideshow of the SQ Arts program is featured on Photo Philanthropy – a website dedicated to showcasing photo documentaries. Peter’ beautiful photography offers people from the outside a view into the power and beauty of what is happening in the 20×40 box that is the SQ Art Studio.

Also in 2009, Prominent writers Junot Diaz, Tobias Wolff and renown clown/doctor Patch Adams visited the program to share work and insights.

Dear friends and supporters of Prison Arts,

An urgent situation has developed from the current state budget crisis with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s response being to layoff staff in education, vocational, substance abuse, and other inmates programs – including the one Artist Facilitator at each prison.

We need your help – the Artist Facilitator position is critical to continuing arts programming with any consistency and quality and we want to raise our voices to powers-that-be.

Would you be willing to write a letter against cutting the Institutional Artist Facilitator position and thus the elimination of Arts in Corrections?

Send your letters to:

Laurie Brooks (we want to collect all the letters), Executive Director, William James Association, P.O. Box 1632, Santa Cruz, CA, 95061, laurie@williamjamesassociation.org

Nettie Sabelhaus, Senate Rules and Appointments, State Capitol, Room 420, Sacramento 95614, Nettie.Sabelhaus@sen.ca.gov

Elizabeth Siggins, Chief Deputy Secretary Adult Programs, CA Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation, 1515 S Street, Suite 501S, Sacramento, CA, 95811, elizabeth.siggins@cdcr.ca.gov

Scott Kernan, Undersecretary, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, P.O. Box 942883, Sacramento, CA, A 94283-0001

Matthew Cate, Secretary, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, P.O. Box 942883, Sacramento, CA, A 94283-0001

Write to your Senators and Assemblypersons – find them with you zip code at www.legislature.ca.gov

Please send me copies of what you send and let me know if I can help you in this effort!
Thank you so much for your support,

Laurie Brooks
Director, William James Association

Here’s a great example letter from Judith:

Dear Ms. Sabelhaus:

Given California’s various crises, I realize that every state agency must make massive cuts. I urge you to bring to the legislature’s attention that the CDCR should not cut Arts in Corrections. The program has minuscule cost and vast positive impact.

Arts in Corrections provides a large number of prisoners with programming that teaches transferrable skills, reduces tension, and encourages deep self-reflection and responsibility – all for the cost of the salary of only one low-range state employee. The professional artists who teach through Arts in Corrections either volunteer or are paid through grants given by individuals and non-profits.

I taught through Arts in Corrections in the 1980s when the program was much more fully funded. My Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin is a memoir about this experience (copy enclosed). For the past decade I have spoken nationally about prison and prison arts and so I am able to see – in state after state – the respect with which California’s Arts in Corrections is held.

To lose Arts in Corrections – a program that costs the state virtually nothing – would be to lose a program that positively impacts large numbers of prisoners and one that is a revered model in the field.

Thanks for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Judith Tannenbaum

jtannen@earthlink.net, www.judithtannenbaum.com

The Prison Arts Project at San Quentin is going strong with activities seven days a week – painting, drawing and printmaking classes, inmate bands, theater, writing workshops and book-binding.

We received a $25,000 challenge grant from the Marin Community Foundation, which means that your donation to support the Prison Arts Project at SQ is doubled.

WJA’s commitment to keeping the arts alive at SQ as a living example of excellence in correctional arts programming and it is paying off:

Michael Franti and Spearhead performed at San Quentin on May 19, 2007. You can see more in an episode of FrantiV or read about it in Leah Garchik’s column in the Chronicle.

Alarm Magazine wrote a long and thoughtful, two-part story about Arts in Corrections at San Quentin.

Marin Independent Journal published an extensive piece about the visual arts program with some very nice photographs of the guys and their artwork.

TOWER BOOK Black/ White [and Read] Designed by Beth Thielen, the Tower Book project is a collaboration between the women of California Rehabilitation Center and the Men of San Quentin and is the first of its kind. The work is currently in the exhibition: “Black/White and Read” which opened at the New York Center for the Book in April, 2007, showed at the San Francisco Center for the Book, last fall, just closed a the Los Angeles Book Arts Center and will open at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts April 2008. More information and pictures are available here.

The creative writing group, aka the San Quentin Nine, has just released their second anthology, Brothers in Pen: A Means of Escape. Their first anthology, Brothers In Pen, released in 2006 is also available on-line.

Congratulations, also, to SQ9 member Kenny Brydon for winning the 2007 PEN.ORG Prison Writing Program honorable mention for fiction with a short story entitled, San Quentin, July 4, 1975.