Guides: Researching Mass Incarceration and Prison Abolition: Art & Oral History

Prison Journalism Project > tab: Stories

Prison Journalism Project > tab: Stories
Section: Poems provides "poetry, songs and spoken word pieces depicting the realities, culture and emotions of incarcerated life. "Section: Art & Illustrations highlights "art, illustrations, photos, cartoons and other visually oriented stories created by incarcerated artists."

Rikers Public Memory Project

Rikers Public Memory Project: A Community Truth and Healing Process
The website of Rikers Public Memory Project: A Community Truth and Healing Process describes this project as "a community-based, participatory initiative through which our collective stories about the impact of Rikers are activated to envision a more just NYC. The project is an outgrowth of an ongoing partnership between Freedom Agenda, Create Forward, and the Humanities Action Lab, who, together, sought to think through the ways that the process of collectively remembering can be used as a strategic organizing tool in the movement to close Rikers Island."

Current Exhibitions

Both Sides of the Wall: Auburn and Its Prison
Exhibition: "Long Term Exhibit"
Location: Cayuga Museum of History & Art, 203 Genesee Street, Auburn, NY 13021
Cayuga Museum "endeavor[s] to create a permanent exhibit about the Auburn Correctional Facility."
Jesse Krimes: Corrections
Exhibition: Oct. 28, 2024–July 13, 2025
Location: The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 851, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028
Excerpt from description: "Photography has played a key role in structuring systems of power in society, including those related to crime and punishment. This exhibition presents immersive contemporary installations by the artist Jesse Krimes (American, b. 1982) alongside nineteenth-century photographs from The Met collection by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, who developed the first modern system of criminal identification before the adoption of fingerprinting."
Pyrrhic Defeat: A Visual Study of Mass Incarceration by Mark Loughney
Location: Eastern State Penitentiary, 2027 Fairmount Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19130
Excerpts from description: "Mark Loughney, Mural Arts Philadelphia’s Reimagining Reentry 2023-2024 Fellow, is a formerly incarcerated painter, draftsman, and portraitist whose art acts as a national courier for criminal justice reform efforts. Pyrrhic Defeat features portraits of people who support criminal justice reform and the abolition of prison slavery alongside portraits of incarcerated individuals."

Past Exhibitions & Related Material

I Tried to Save Myself: Work from Representatives of Recess Assembly
Exhibition: Oct. 28 - Dec. 1, 2022. "Recess Assembly youth fellows and program educators present[ed] a selection of work confronting ideas of identity, the body, and radical beauty, tied together by the thread of fraternity and community."
Location was: The Gallatin Galleries, 1 Washington Pl @ Broadway, New York, NY.

Incorrigibles (oral history archive)
Incorrigibles (short film directed by Alison Cornyn)
"On January 24, 2018, Incorrigibles [a transmedia project & team] premiered the Incorrigibles short film, featuring the stories and voices of girls who were incarcerated at the New York State Training School for Girls in Hudson, New York."
(Running time: 13:11 min.)
Incorrigibles: Bearing Witness to the Incarcerated Girls and Women of New York
On Jan. 31, 2019, Brooklyn Law School hosted the panel event: Incorrigibles: Bearing Witness to the Incarcerated Girls and Women of New York. This event coincided with an exhibit at the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse. The exhibit featured "the work of artist Alison Cornyn and the Incorrigibles project, work by artist Beth Thielen, known for her one-of-a-kind artist books and public art projects; a collaborative work with embroidery artist Diana Weylan, writings by girls and women who currently are or formerly were incarcerated; and paintings by Aaliyah, a young artist [who was] enrolled in an alternative to incarceration program."
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
Exhibition: May 1 - Dec. 4, 2023. Curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media at NYU. The Schomburg Center's description noted this "acclaimed exhibition...explores the impact of the US prison system on contemporary visual art."
Location was: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, 515 Malcolm X Boulevard (135th St and Malcolm X Blvd) New York, NY.

Related Material:

Facebook: Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (ebook) by Nicole R. Fleetwood - described in the Books box on the right of this page.

Hilarie M. Sheets, From Prison to the Art Gallery (Sept. 22, 2022)

Article subtitle: Formerly incarcerated artists [a group who exhibited their work in Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration] are making waves in the collecting world, hoping to create pathways, and dignity, for their peers.

Talking Back: Artists of the Columbia Collective
Exhibition: Sept. 3 - Sept. 25, 2022. Curated by Sofia Thieu D’Amico. Presented by Foreland & The Juvenile Justice Arts & Media Network.
Location: Foreland, 111 Water Street, Catskill, NY.
This exhibit highlighted "new site-specific works from the Columbia Collective: a multimedia group of young female and trans artists named after their previous facility, the New York Department of Corrections’ Columbia Secure Center for Girls in Claverack, New York." The artists are now incarcerated at the Brookwood Secure Center for Youth. On its web page (below), this arts group proclaims: WE AREN’T DEFINED BY JUST ONE MOMENT.
The Columbia Collective
Visit this site to view the powerful art of the Columbia Collective.

Articles, Video & Link to Website of Film: Sing Sing

The Marshall Project, Art in Criminal Justice: A Curated Collection of Links (Updated 5:43 am, Mar. 19, 2025)

Links to articles.

Brian Edsall, 'Sing Sing' Could Change How We See Justice and Incarceration | Opinion, Newsweek (updated Jan. 10, 2025 at 1:03 PM EST) + official website of film: Sing Sing (describes how to watch this film) + website of program: Rehabilitation Through the Arts

CBS News, How theater can break the cycle of incarceration (Dec. 15, 2024) [video]
Running time: 10:24 min.

Description: "The critically-acclaimed film 'Sing Sing,' starring Colman Domingo and newcomer Clarence Maclin, was inspired by a theater program at New York's notorious Sing Sing prison, where the recidivism rates of inmates who engaged in the performing and visual arts plummeted. 'Sunday Morning' senior correspondent Ted Koppel visits the theater program at Sing Sing with a few of the formerly incarcerated (who make up most of the cast of the film) to talk about how acting truly changed their lives."

Arthur Lubow, With 10,000 Pebbles and Poker Cards, This Artist Takes on the Prison System: Jesse Krimes solos in two New York shows, at the Metropolitan Museum and the Jack Shainman Gallery, N.Y. Times (updated Nov. 14, 2024)

Patricia Leigh Brown, For the American Prison Writing Archive, a ‘Shadow Canon’ Sheds Light, N.Y. Times (Apr. 17, 2023)

Tip: BLS students, faculty and administrators: Click here for instructions to create an individual account to access The New York Times. BLS students, faculty and administrators who have Lexis+ accounts also can link to this story here. (Log in required.)

Daniel Grant, U.S. Government Withholds Art Made by Detainees at Guantánamo Bay, The Art Newspaper (Oct. 31, 2022)

Article subtitle: Five years ago, a landmark exhibition of art created by detainees began touring the U.S. But a government U-turn has blocked works from leaving the prison, raising the question: whose art is it?

Adam Bradley, The Artists Taking on Mass Incarceration, N.Y. Times Style Magazine (Aug. 11, 2022)

Books (available through BLS Library)

The Guantánamo Artwork and Testimony of Moath al-Alwi: Deaf Walls Speak by Alexandra S. Moore & Elizabeth Swanson, eds.
Publication Date: 2024
In catalog record for this book, click: ACCESS ONLINE VERSION - (EBC). 1 digital copy is available. First-time use of EBC platform requires BLS patrons to click: Create Account. (Off-campus use: requires proxy.)
Excerpt from ebook's description: "Deaf Walls Speak presents an insider's view of artmaking in Guantánamo, the world's most notorious prison, as self-expression and protest...."
Making Art in Prison: Survival and Resistance by Janie Paul
Call Number: N6505.5.O87 P38 2023 (Main)
Publication Date: 2023
For 27 years, Janie Paul met Michigan artists and selected works for: The Annual Exhibitions of Artists in Michigan Prisons. This book includes 200+ images of these artists' work.

Related video + images highlighting the work of artists featured in this video:

Making Art in Prison: A Reflection on the Prison Creative Arts Project

Fight the Power: Law and Policy Through Hip Hop Songs by Gregory S. Parks & Frank Rudy Cooper, eds.
Call Number: ML3918.R37 F55 2022 (Main)
Publication Date: 2022
Excerpt from publisher's book description: "Taking inspiration from Public Enemy's lead vocalist Chuck D - who once declared that 'rap is the CNN of young Black America' - this volume brings together leading legal commentators to make sense of some of the most pressing law and policy issues in the context of hip-hop music and the ongoing struggle for Black equality."
Love and Abolition: The Social Life of Black Queer Performance by Alison Rose Reed
Call Number: HV9276.5 .R44 2022 (Main)
Publication Date: 2022
Excerpt from this book's prologue (p. xvii): "Rather than perceiving the persistence of settler colonialism, the military and prison industrial complexes, immigration control apparatus, and other forms of state violence as signs of defeat, writers, artists, performers, dreamers and organizers continue to posit concrete visions of another world....the Black queer performance texts constellated here certainly offer powerful opposition to the nightmarish status quo, but they also generate new forms of collectivity rooted in care, instead of in systems of criminalization, coercion, and control."
Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, but Enough (ebook) by Kyle Tran Myhre (author) & Casper Pham (artist)
Publication Date: 2022
In catalog record for this book, click: ACCESS ONLINE VERSION - (EBSCO). Unlimited user access. (Off-campus use: requires proxy.)
Excerpts from book description: "In poetry, dialogue and visual art the book follows two wandering poets as they make their way from village to village, across a prison colony moon full of exiled rebels, robots, and storytellers." A "toolkit for emerging poets and aspiring movement-builders."
Rebel Speak: A Justice Movement Mixtape (ebook) by Bryonn Rolly Bain
Publication Date: 2022
In catalog record for this book, click: ACCESS ONLINE VERSION - (EBC). Unlimited user access. First-time use of EBC platform requires BLS patrons to click: Create Account. (Off-campus use: requires proxy.)
Includes: Track #7: Live from juvi: the artivism of Maya Jupiter and Aloe Blacc, a dialogue with Rosa M. Rios (aka Rosie).
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (ebook) by Nicole R. Fleetwood
Publication Date: 2020
In catalog record for this book, click: ACCESS ONLINE VERSION - (EBC). Unlimited user access. First-time use of EBC platform requires BLS patrons to click: Create Account. (Off-campus use: requires proxy.)
Excerpt from publisher's book description: "More than two million people are currently behind bars in the United States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and communities; it also exposes them to shocking levels of deprivation and abuse and subjects them to the arbitrary cruelties of the criminal justice system. Yet, as Nicole Fleetwood reveals, America's prisons are filled with art. Despite the isolation and degradation they experience, the incarcerated are driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them. Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author's own family experiences with the penal system, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions--including solitary confinement--these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender."
America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s (ebook) by Lee Bernstein
Publication Date: 2010
In catalog record for this book, click: ACCESS ONLINE VERSION - (EBSCO). Unlimited user access. (Off-campus use: requires proxy.)
Excerpt from book summary: "Bernstein explores the forces that sparked a dramatic 'prison art renaissance' in the 1970s, when incarcerated people produced powerful works of writing, performance, and visual art."