Maine Coastal Regional Reentry Center, Belfast ME, Drawing and Painting Class, Summer 2017
In Summer 2017, I carried out a 10 week self-designed project, funded by Bowdoin Career Planning’s McKinley Grant. The project consisted of teaching a five week introductory drawing/painting class at Maine Coastal Regional Reentry Center as well as painting my students’ portraits.
I brought an art class to MCRRC with the purpose of teaching skills to communicate through images. I also meant to provide exposure to the mood-stabilizing, peaceful, and constructive experience of making art. The class covered the gridding technique for representational drawing, negative space, proportions of the face, cross hatching and shading, basic volumetric and perspective drawing, and color theory. We also had the opportunity to go off-site for class time to paint from life.
Maine Coastal Regional Reentry Center is a minimum security facility with increased access to programming and earned freedoms like the potential for work release. It is run in partnership with Volunteers of America and Waldo County Sheriff’s Department. Residents are incarcerated men in the last 9-18 months of their sentences.
For the second half of the project, I painted two portraits of each student. The portraits are part of my own skill development, as well as an intended work of activism. In presenting the portraits at Bowdoin, I mean to bring a population with many privileges, including the potential to influence societal norms and governmental policies, my impactful experience with six individuals this summer. I mean to bring attention to the atrocity of mass incarceration and to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated peoples’ limited rights and opportunities. I also hope to encourage accepting attitudes toward as well as actionable work for the benefit of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Additionally, in asking the individuals how they wanted to be portrayed visually, I hoped I could work to provide a dignifying, positive experience rather than an exploitative one.
The issue of my coming in as a relatively unqualified outsider and providing what I deemed to be useful information and skills has been on my mind since the beginning brainstorm of this project. I also have been navigating the exploitative nature of portraiture, especially of incarcerated subjects. I know that this project does have aspects of my coming in as a privileged outsider, and using experiences of others in my art as well as for presentation in this project. I have worked to be aware and combat these elements. I think they will always be present as I am an outsider to the personal experience of incarceration, but I am sure I could do better! I would really appreciate feedback on this point and anything else!
