filed under Activism | Arts | Brown | Civil Rights | Education | Gallery Openings | Get Out of the House | Social Justice
SPACE: an opening
10:00PM ON
05/03/2008
BY
Ariel Werner
Many of you know that, for the past two years, I have been facilitating arts and writing workshops at the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institutions (ACI) through Space in Prison for the Arts and Creative Expression (SPACE).
This Sunday, May 4, SPACE will be opening its annual exhibit of art and writing from the ACI. The exhibit will take place in the Youth Gallery at AS220, 115 Empire Street from 4 PM to 7 PM.
In addition to displaying art and writing, we will be reading selections of poetry written by the men and women who participate in our workshops. We will also be distributing our annual Zine, a collection of their work. Refreshments will be served. If you can’t make it on Sunday, the exhibit will be up in the AS220 Youth Gallery through July; please stop in and check it out!
More about SPACE and the exhibit after the jump.
Founded in 1992, Space in Prison for the Arts and Creative Expression (SPACE) is a joint program of the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institutions (ACI) and the Howard R. Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown University. Through SPACE, men and women from the two institutions—Brown and the ACI—collaborate in creative arts workshops. This year, we have facilitated workshops in poetry, writing, visual arts, song, dance, theater, and hip-hop in women’s minimum and medium security and men’s medium and maximum security facilities. This exhibit offers an important (though it could never be comprehensive) insight into the creative space of our workshops.
We aim to construct a forum that is open, supportive, and safe. Our workshops engage with but, ultimately, hope to transcend boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, and culture. Through art, we share our experiences with one another. It is this interchange of emotion and ideas that makes SPACE workshops exciting, meaningful, and sometimes painful, but often hilarious.
In presenting and viewing this work, it is crucial that we acknowledge the complicated nature of an exhibit featuring the artwork of the incarcerated. We are displaying this work on their behalf, and so that their artistic voices can be heard. Still, their voices remain silenced in many ways, and their absence characterizes the nature of this show. Let us use this show as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of incarceration. Humanity, therapy, and personal explorations shine through in many of these pieces and texts, but so do oppression and injustice. We hope that you will join us in taking the time to consider these works as individual acts of creativity while, at the same time, recognizing and reflecting on the context in which they were created.
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