by Annabel Manning
On the last day of my Hine Fellowship, the Men’s Empowerment Program (MEP) interns at the Harlem Community Justice Center (HCJC) had the opportunity to experience the power of creating their own art exhibition while drawing public attention during their graduation. MEP is a new program designed to create a safe space for men of color, ages 18-25, through placemaking, community advocacy and involvement, employment, and career/educational counseling.
They created still and video/audio collages of their neighborhood blocks, inspired by Romare Bearden’s work in Harlem decades earlier. Each intern said a few words at the opening about their visions of their neighborhood blocks, interrogating concepts of belonging, community, self, and identity. Several expressed their excitement at being recognized as artists, often for the first time in their lives.
Our plan is to mount the digitized versions of the block pieces on fencing surrounding an area of the Wagner public housing development in East Harlem, once construction for the community hub, organized by the Justice Center’s Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety, is complete.
I am also working collaboratively on a series called “a self of my former shadow,” a phrase from the poetry of Evie Shockley. The idea is that the activity of art transforms a person into a self (with agency), free from being a mere shadow of his/her future self. The new series includes images from the HCJC MEP group below, but will also extend to works from other projects I have been working on.
Interns reconnected at their art opening with artist Pastor Isaac Scott, who came in a prior week on my invitation to meet with the MEP interns, and who is an important role model and resource for them going forward. Pastor Scott is a previously incarcerated artist from the East Harlem community and Program Director (and Founder) of “The Confined Arts,” as well as the Arts and Communications Coordinator at the Center for Justice, Columbia University, where he is also a student.
For the past several months a group of us, including Pastor Isaac Scott, Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, and others have been organizing the Prison Art + Aesthetics Project (PAAP), an 18-month series of symposia, art exhibitions, poetry readings, plays, concerts, and other art events focused on the transdisciplinary aesthetics of prison art in the U.S. and elsewhere. All events will be centered on the lived experiences, art, and spiritual empowerment of people presently and formerly incarcerated along with their impacted families and communities. Youth involved in MEP and in other HCJC programs will be welcome as participants in PAAP.
PAAP will explore the roles of prison art and aesthetics in four overlapping areas:
before prison (e.g., education, social support, employment);
during prison (e.g., art programs, independent art activities, educational programs);
after prison (e.g., reentry/reintegration, parole, voting);
beyond prison (e.g., alternatives to incarceration, restorative models of justice and abolition).
HCJC will be part of the “before” prison activities and programs.
As part of PAAP, I am proposing to organize an exhibit of art around incarceration that will include the artworks of HCJC-MEP participants along with other artists at Cathedral of St John the Divine. Our inaugural event will be on September 25-26, 2020, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
