The artwork
#Jail Artistic Arts Challenge #prisons #socialjustice
January 31, 2023
Grace Ebert
![A painting of a man sitting in a reflecting pool with broken steel bars in the foreground](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/pcap-6-scaled.jpg)
“Self-Portrait: Free Inside” by Jamal Biggs
As abolitionists and activists battle to finish mass incarceration and the appalling residing circumstances in US prisons, people and organizations have taken it upon themselves to assist these caught within the unjust system. The Jail Artistic Arts Challenge has been doing such work for many years, bringing its College of Michigan neighborhood along with these immediately affected by the jail system by way of workshops, studying alternatives and an annual exhibition.
The artwork was an out-of-body expertise as a result of once you’re in that type of setting, there’s often a whole lot of violence or simply a whole lot of unhappy stuff. Artwork was a path to freedom on the skin. — Josh Herrera
On this dialog, Colossal Managing Editor Grace Ebert talks with two previously incarcerated artists, Johnny Van Patten and Josh Herrera, and college director Nora Krinitsky about how artistic practices work whereas incarcerated, why exhibiting and promoting work is important for the method and what precisely the humanity of artwork means in a system constructed on dehumanization.
Learn the interview.
![A painting with a fence in a green landscape](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/pcap-5.jpg)
“Fence” by Kenneth Gourlay, a member of the Linkage Challenge
![A photo of a woman taking a photo of art on an exhibition wall](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/pcap-4.jpg)
2022 Exhibition “Shared Humanity”. Photograph by Nathan Kennedy
#Jail Artistic Arts Challenge #prisons #socialjustice
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