Under Arrest

John Haber
in New York City

Marking Time and James (Yaya) Hough

For six long months, New Yorkers experienced a modified house arrest, only intensifying in June as vandalism led to boarded-up windows and an unprecedented city-wide curfew. For Parisians in the first weeks of a pandemic, the analogy was even less of a stretch. They had to present proof of intentions to the police just to take a walk. And that drives home how little I know of prisons—and how easy it is to make so much as thinking about them serve only me.

It can serve, too, to reinforce a mentality of us versus them, with them safely behind bars. Did the curfew show just how slow New York's mayor and governor were to question the police and to distinguish two nights of opportunism from weeks of sustained protest that black lives matter? Fine, but the rest is out of sight and out of mind. It is, that is, except for "Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration," art about and mostly by present and former inmates at MoMA PS1. A past show with much the same title was largely a cover for abstract painting. Here the names of the high-security prisons here are ominous and familiar.

Mainstream journalism does not often look inside a prison, no more than prisoners can look out or look away. Reports of brutality at New York City's largest jail have been horrific enough, but the most memorable report of all stopped at the door. Formally in the Bronx, Rikers Island is ever so close to Queens, but at an unbridgeable distance. Prisoners speak of that moment as the bus passes LaGuardia Airport and there is no going back. James (Yaya) Hough no longer faces life in a maximum security prison, but he would understand. He cannot leave it behind in his art.

Heaven and earth

What, then, is prison for them, other than the "prison-industrial complex"? It must seem like hell to Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter (aka Isis tha Saviour), who spent thirty-six hours of birthing in shackles. In legend, it can pass for heaven, as inmates find religious salvation or turn their lives around. Call me dubious and call the legend self-serving on behalf of those outside, but it happens. Fyodor Dostoevsky saw his life that way. The ones here, of course, found art.

Or call it earth, for prison to them is necessarily life, day by day. Daniel McCarthy Clifford makes art from "inmate activity" books, with games and puzzles to pass the time—quite apart from the puzzle of obtaining release. Clifford also collects cardboard food trays. He treats some as portraits from prison life, with a few words of text about individuals, and stacks others into something like Minimalist sculpture. In the show's largest work, Jesse Krimes applies newsprint and his own marks to thirty-three prison bedsheets for a panorama of heaven, earth, and hell. Their borders are hard to discern, and it is a short step from flying through heaven to dancing on earth or twisting in hell.

Krimes calls another work from solitary confinement his purgatory, with playing cards and images transferred to bars of soap. That may be a better analogy, but no matter. If the worst comes with the comforting or banal, the show often defies the obvious barriers between inside and outside. That is part of its aim to make the inside visible. It is also part of a view of prison and culture at large as infecting each other. The chief curator, Nicole R. Fleetwood of Rutgers University, speaks of a "carceral esthetics," and she does not mean an esthetics of the incarcerated alone.

Much of the work looks both inside and out. Larry Cook restages visiting hours after prison, often outdoors. People in his photos seem downright at ease, but then the visiting room was always their slim connection to the outside world. Isis tha Saviour's video of her labor pains is, of necessity, a reenactment—and a music video at that. Sara Bennett, a public defender, photographs women in their bedrooms after release and in their cells for life, and they look much the same. As in actual house arrest, these women are making whatever they can their own.

Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick photograph black communities in Louisiana, Angola prison included. Maria Gaspar photographs penitentiaries from the outside, in all their terrifying mass. They could pass for the view from many an open highway, like America by Car for Lee Friedlander without the people and their cars. Dean Gillispie passes his time making miniatures of gas stations and the like along actual roads. They suffer badly by comparison.

Things do get grisly. Billy Sell died after a hunger strike, in protest against solitary confinement, documenting his anger along the way. Anger becomes explicit in photocopies from Ojore Lutalo, concerning the Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army. It bears down from the walls in portraits by Russell Craig, on harsh leather and in slashing paint. Anger Is Building, reads text from a large assemblage by Gilberto Rivera. How then, the show asks, does it so often go unheard?

The museum as prison

To be sure, not everyone out there supports mass incarceration. That is so last year, I want to protest, given the backlash against three-strike laws and talk of "superpredators." It hurt Hillary Clinton in 2016, and it still dogs Joe Biden, despite white Republican cries for "law and order." An artist friend, Maureen Kelleher, works days on behalf of prisoner release—and (in the interest of self-disclosure) my stepfather long volunteered to counsel prisoners approaching their release. To be sure, too, the pandemic is not just a metaphor. The death toll is highest in confined spaces, like nursing homes and prisons, and African American artists like Jamaal Peterman and Sherrill Roland in the galleries are paying attention.

MoMA PS1 in fact opens with art after Covid-19—a packed room of portraits on paper by Mark Loughney. All his subjects are wearing masks. Next door, Tameca Cole treats a self-portrait as itself a mask, with shaded pencil covering her face except for her eyes. Life in prison, she suggests takes looking out for oneself and lying low. Rivera's assemblage names the virus explicitly. Still, in no time the show speaks less to mass incarceration, the pandemic, and Covid New York than to individuals and that life between heaven and hell.

Much of it is simple portraiture, and much of that is pretty routine, although skilled. I hate to say it, but doing time does not confer sainthood or artistry. If you have not heard of these forty-four artists before, I cannot promise that you will hear of all that many again, for all their collective eloquence. Still, portraiture puts another issue out there, loud and clear. The vast majority of faces for Loughney are people of color, and so are most of the faces within. Black lives matter, really, even apart from deaths at the hands of police.

The show's amateur or, conversely, conservative side brings home another point, too: art gets people through prison. It attests to official programs and self-directed ones as well, like Ronnie Goodman's Arts in Correction at San Quentin. James Hough, known as Yaya, has mentored Craig and others—and Craig's surfaces include art-history texts for a portrait of man who finished college in prison (with a thesis on "Messianic Black Bodies"). On a less formal note, Aimee Wissman gets by with handmade postcards, with often funny but not at all optimistic messages. As one reads, "your appeal is denied."

The show could well do with less optimism. Maybe political art in the age of identity politics has to be upbeat, and one group calls itself Women on the Rise! Still, it makes its greatest impact with the glare of orange hoodies. Halim Flowers has his painful side as well—with a collage of shivering revolutionary soldiers crossing the Delaware for Jacob Lawrence, from his American Struggle. In a memorable look beyond a prisoner or herself, Rowan Renee confronts her father's history as a sexual predator, printing records of his victims on hanging slabs and sheer fabric. She has not served time, and still her work is No Spirit for Me.

Justin Sterling can hope to break out or to break through, with soil and plants behind broken windows. Still, where is art about confinement from ever so many others beyond the walls, from Danny Lyon to the present? As I left, through the virus-wracked museum's empty corridors in sad times, I felt at once strangely free to roam and strangely confined. I had entered through those awful cement walls and gravel courtyard, which MoMA added when it took over the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. If the new Whitney Museum by Renzo Piano looks from the outside as institutional as a hospital, MoMA PS1 now looks like a prison. Maybe the privileged at times can still feel the pain.

From a person to a prisoner

James (Yaya) Hough sums up the transition from a person to an prisoner in a single image. A line in prison fatigues through what might be a metal detector, but it strips men naked with a bowel in place of hair, the very image of a space alien. A sewn seam runs across the bowl in some prisoners, from back to front, and a long way down the chest of others. The length of a sentence hardly matters, not when the marks of violence remain. Another drawing reduces the future to a formula: Work, Consume, Be Silent, and DIE.

Other sketches bear text, too, but not all that many, for good reason: confinement's awful power rests on silence. "Grief and Grievance," on the theme of racial injustice at the New Museum, had its own formula. Black America, it said, knows grief, while angry, ignorant whites have their grievances, but Hough knows better. He calls his show "Grievance," a reference to his past, but also to a form for inmates to report their conditions. They know all too well the consequences of filling it out.

Hough finds it useful nonetheless. Art for him began in prison, where materials are scant, and it served him as paper—along with telephone authorization forms, authorized visitors lists, cafeteria menus, and more. He really could fill out a form, but with images. He could also enter Philadelphia's Mural Arts Restorative Justice program. It helped get him through twenty-five years, in juvenile detention at age seventeen and then in Graterford prison from 1993 to 2019. The first few works are little more than smudges, but the time behind bars almost effaced a life.

Art was the Pittsburgh native's ticket to freedom, but not his only ticket. The Supreme Court ruled against life sentences without possibility of parole for minors, although release took another seven years. He became artist-in-residence at the Philadelphia district attorney's office, which one can see as a bitter irony or a just reward. (He appeared as well, of course, in "Marking Time.") The gallery declines to say how he had so severe a sentence, which must sound like papering over a serious crime, but I prefer to see it as due discretion. There are more than enough horrors in his art.

Most of show dates from 2008 to 2016, as "Invisible Life," and most of that is in pencil. Hough reserves color for the occasional portrait and for guards in uniform, while others have their grisly uniform of sewn, naked flesh. Yet the guards hardly appear, because prisoners face more than individual misconduct. From the moment they enter, they are caught up in a machine. It is a primitive machine, of pulleys attached to prison beds and bodies, but then everything here is clinical but primitive. The pulleys suffice to string one prisoner upside-down, with the label Ecce Homo, or "behold the man."

That label comes from a more famous example of prisoner abuse, Jesus before Pontius Pilate—as in Renaissance and Baroque paintings from Fra Angelico and Antonello da Messina to El Greco and Jusepe de Ribera. If that sounds self-aggrandizing, Hough's series is in a storied tradition. He updates Francisco de Goya and The Disasters of War for the age of the graphic novel. Scenes range from the economy of illustration to a more accomplished realism in the living faces of invisible men. Boots outside a door have a cryptic poignancy. Are they barred from leaving or entering, or has he finally made it home?

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Marking Time" ran at MoMA PS1 through April 4, 2021, James (Yaya) Hough at JTT through April 1, 2023.