Reimagining the Revolution, page 2
After receiving the June paper and my note, Gerald wrote to me that the experience of seeing his art used in such a manner brought him a glimmer of light during a “dark time” in his life. At that point Gerald had been incarcerated for twenty years. He had been locked down in his cell for months due to the pandemic and denied access to the San Quentin art studio that had served as a saving grace for him throughout the years. It was lonely, and a haunting reminder of what it felt like to be new in prison again.
Gerald had been released by the time I finished Reimagining the Revolution. I was able to track him down through the Humans of San Quentin, a humanitarian nonprofit that proliferates the stories of individuals impacted by the criminal justice system. They had interviewed Gerald upon his release and passed along his information.1 I was anxious to ask him about the piece that had moved me so greatly and had brought us together.
“I’ve seen that specific face in a number of individuals including myself,” he told me when we finally connected. “Whenever we are doing time, we don’t ever know what to expect from one day to the next. As far as the possibilities of paroling, that’s always happening way outside the door. We have a deep, dark understanding of where we are and nothing is open to us except maybe a back door. The element of freedom is so far beyond.”
It was a feeling that hit Gerald hard when he first entered the prison system in 1998. For the first two years, he said, he isolated, rarely leaving his cell for fear of what he might encounter in the general population. He had begun to feel “invisible,” something he captured in Anticipation, which precedes this book’s introductory chapter. Anticipation is a retelling of the faces he saw in the prison visiting room, anxious women in a strange place waiting with both excitement and apprehension. Sometimes, Gerald said, “they don’t even see you.”
The feelings of loneliness and fear were so acute in these early years that they crept up twenty-two years later, long after he’d already integrated himself with the men he was incarcerated with and developed friendships he holds to this day.
Most of these relationships were fostered in the art studio. As a child, Gerald had loved to draw, so he gravitated toward the studio. He met other artists I’ve worked with, such as Bruce Fowler, who taught him how to mix paints, and Isaiah Daniels, who instructed him on photorealism. The men in the studio became his “perimeter,” the people he could feel comfortable around and relate to. They were his peers and teachers, and the studio was his sanctuary.
I asked him about this dichotomy—the life he lived in prison and the life he lived in the art studio—which he depicted in both the beauty and sadness of Doing Time.
“That’s the only time when it don’t feel like you’re doing time,” he said. “Beyond that front door to that art studio is prison, but when you come into that art studio and you’re creating something or learning something, you don’t think about what’s going on beyond that door. You get a chance within the studio for your mind to be free as well as your body as you create.”
Since his release in February 2023, Gerald has reunited with his family, including his sister, whose portrait introduces chapter 4. He bought a full-size easel and extra canvases and has started work on his next art project. He got a job working by Pier 39, a section of San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf that is lined with high-end art galleries, but he says his inspiration is still drawn from the men he left behind across the Bay.
“My roots are still in the prison system. They got me through all that time, and those are the people I’m connected to, the people I still reach out to when I’m tossing around ideas.”
“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.”
—Twyla Tharp
Carnell Hunnicutt Sr.
In the preface of this book, you’ll read about Carnell Hunnicutt, a graphic artist who transformed Marc Mauer’s Race to Incarcerate into a graphic novel. An “official” graphic novel was published by the New Press in 2013, but it was illustrated by established artist Sabrina Jones, supposedly, according to a presentation Marc gave, with a blessing from an incarcerated creator. The whole thing seemed shady, so I started looking for the original artist. “Carnell Hunnicutt,” as he appeared briefly in Marc’s introduction, was easy to find via a simple Google search. The top hit is a link to his aggregated work on the Real Cost of Prisons Project (www.realcostofprisons.org), a website that includes written work and comics by prisoners, a daily news blog focused on mass incarceration, and three comic books for purchase. The landing page for Carnell’s work begins with a picture of him with RCPP founder Lois Ahrens, a brief copyright statement, and a note: “Great news! Carnell is free!!!”
After some internet sleuthing, I found out that Carnell had been freed from a supermax prison in Sommers, Connecticut, in March 2023 after twenty-nine years of incarceration. He had moved back home to Texas and reconnected with his family. I pinged him on Facebook and eventually we got on the phone.
I asked him about what went down with Marc, and if he’d conceded to having another artist run with his idea. Although Carnell was wounded by the interaction (as you’ll read in the preface), he said that he faced many challenges as an incarcerated artist, namely access to supplies and retaliation from correctional officers.
“I wanted to tell my story through art because I was witnessing things as a prisoner that show how corrupt the Department of Corrections and the whole system is,” Carnell said. “I wanted to tell the story of what I was enduring and what I was witnessing during that time.”
The Connecticut prison department put Carnell in and out of solitary confinement for a total of thirteen years. In isolation, Carnell started reading about politics, socialism, and capitalism. He read about Black liberation movement leaders like Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey. He read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Mauer’s Race to Incarcerate, creating comic book versions of each, once he could access pen, paper, and a decent source of light again. The first page of his version of Race to Incarcerate precedes chapter 2.
Every time Carnell would emerge from solitary, his drawings would become a little more political, a little more pointed at the injustices of the system that confined him. He took on issues like overcrowding, police violence, and guards’ attacks on prisoners. He drew two non-comic images with colored pencils of a segregation cell and the prison’s “recreation cage,” a space boxed in by a fourteen-foot concrete wall and a steel cage roof—prisoners’ only access to fresh air and sunlight.
Each illustration brought increasingly harsher consequences, which Carnell says he has nightmares about to this day. Once guards put him in four-point bed restraints and beat him. They put him on “pen restriction,” not only removing his sole artistic tool but the instrument with which he could file an appeal against such action. When he was able to smuggle in ink cartridges, guards tried to break his hands.
These attempts had the opposite effect from their intent: Rather than break Carnell into submission, they fueled his artistic desire.
“A lot of my best work comes from the supermax. You’re down 24/7; you have no contact with anyone; you’re chained up when you come out, strip-searched when you leave, and antagonized by the guards. And you can’t put your hands on them, so you need an outlet. My outlet was my art.
“I could use it to tell them off, make them laugh, or tell a story. I directed my anger into my artwork to keep me at peace.”
Since his release, Carnell says, he hasn’t had much time for drawing. He’s reestablishing relationships with his children and family, working on getting his commercial driver’s license, and adapting to a society that has changed dramatically in the thirty years since he last saw it. He does have plans, however, to aggregate his work, much of which he sent to his brother-in-law for safekeeping, and publish an anthology of the art that kept him at peace during his darkest hours.
“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
—Aristotle
Scott Smith
The most prolific contributor to the newspaper was Scott “Scotty Scott” Smith. He was featured in All of Us or None in September 2020 after he sent an ink and pencil drawing entitled COVID Creature.2 It reminded me of a Ralph Steadman caricature from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Crooked fingers hold a circular object detailed with a grid pattern over a misshapen face. I couldn’t stop looking at it and was even more taken aback when I saw it was made with simple tools I had in my desk pen holder.
I scanned the image and published it alongside a column about COVID inside prisons written by an incarcerated contributor. I sent three issues to Scotty with a personal note and a list of topics I planned to cover in the months ahead. Within weeks, he sent a drawing for the October “Election Issue,” an image drawn in a completely different style. It is full color, and while still a bit cartoonish, not at all abstract like the COVID creature. It portrays a man in an orange hoodie and baggy jeans with a backpack, arms crossed, and eyes covered by sunglasses. He stands between two signs, one yellow that reads “It’s Not Too Late … So VOTE And …” and a stop sign that reads “Stop Hate.”
I used Scotty’s drawings in so many consecutive issues that I had to hold off for a couple of months to ensure other artists were being recognized. But then he sent me Bigger Than Life, a black-ink portrait of Rep. John Lewis. Scotty’s delicate pen strokes depicted Lewis’s stoic yet booming presence, his eyes focused and determined above carefully shadowed cheekbones. After printing it in the March 2021 issue, I framed it and put money in Scotty’s commissary account with the memo “fine art.” Mounted above my desk as I write this, the drawing still moves me.
Our correspondence continued after I left All of Us or None. Scotty still contributes to the paper, and about a year after I left I saw his drawing Not Feeling the Freedom, which prefaces chapter 3, on the cover of another issue. It had also been published by Prison Journalism Project, a fairly new enterprise that mentors and features incarcerated writers and brings their work into the mainstream.
“The Statue of Liberty is supposed to symbolize freedom for all American people, but the statue is an imposter,” Scotty wrote on the PJP website. “The only ones who are free in this country are the super-rich. They can do whatever they want and get away with it because money buys power. Everyone I know in prison is poor. Poverty is what causes crime—it’s always been this way.”3
Scotty still sends me incredible works of art, including the two other pieces featured in this book. The portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that leads into chapter 5 is in a similar style to the John Lewis drawing hanging above my desk. The World Right Now, the acrylic that introduces chapter 7, has this inscription on the back: “It doesn’t matter if one is black, white, red, or brown. We are all just bricks. We are all just the same inside. It is amazing to me most people don’t get it. As Pink Floyd once sang, ‘We are all just bricks in the wall.’ It should go without saying black bricks matter and without them, the whole thing comes tumbling down.”
I can’t offer Scotty much of an exchange in the way of art—I have a hard enough time staying within the lines of my son’s coloring books—but I do maintain a close relationship with him. We check in regularly on a ViaPath Technologies–issued tablet, a recent technological advancement in prison communications that allows prisoners to send digital correspondence and schedule video visits.
For most of our friendship, Scotty has been incarcerated in the state prison in Corcoran, California. We have never spoken on the phone, nor have we had any video visits. He tells me he’s “grown old in prison,” that he’s lost most of his teeth due to “things that happened in here,” and requested I not include a photo of him in this book. Instead, he sent me probably my favorite work of his to date, Self Portrait, which precedes this note. To me it embodies everything this book is about: the complex web of colors and shapes that define our humanity, the array of perceptions our faces provoke in different onlookers, and the demand and challenge to absorb every detail.
“I have realized in myself a sense of wanting fairness and prosperity for everyone in the world regardless of who they are, what their creed and whatever the sexual preference, so long as it hurts no one else,” Scotty wrote in the note accompanying the portrait. “I feel deep inside me a call to fight the Good fight for all people, however especially for my people, my fellow inmates and convicts, no matter what kind of mistakes they have made.”
In my mind, Scotty looks like a moving shadow, his features indiscernible and his voice rendered mute. In the absence of physical attributes, I am able to unearth what truly connects us. To me, he is his passion for art. He is a person who can find beauty in both color and grayscale, who uses whatever he has to make something great in the hopes that it will be seen by even a single person on the outside. On the back of each drawing he’s sent is a note: “Use it if you want, or just enjoy it.”
Of the three artists featured in this book, only Scotty remains in prison. As he enters his second decade of incarceration, he only asks one thing in return for his work: That you look at it, and that by seeing it, he may be seen as well.
“There is no must in art because art is free.”
—Wassily Kandinsky
Prison art, by its very nature, is revolutionary. Simply creating art in a system designed to deprive people of identity and beauty is a form of protest. It is an expression of freedom in a world of restrictions and cages. For many incarcerated individuals, this possession of their internal freedom to create is both what keeps them going and what makes their work so devastatingly beautiful.
I want to acknowledge Peter Merts, a photographer, whose portraits of Gerald’s work and art from other California prisoners created a conduit between myself and the incarcerated artists I’ve met and been inspired by. Peter not only photographs these works of art in a professional way, but he also captures the joy and passion each artist experiences in creating them, with candid shots of different classes. This human element helps visitors of his website see these men and women as artists, not prisoners or faceless producers. I encourage you to visit PeterMerts.com to learn more about arts in the carceral setting.
Gerald, Carnell, and Scotty were compensated for their contributions to this book. Each one volunteered his work at first, but their generosity was denied for two important reasons. I relay them here in hopes that future collaborations become more equitable between artists who have experienced incarceration and those who are perhaps working with them for the first time.
The more obvious reason is hypocrisy. The following pages will dive into the dehumanization that occurs in the prison-industrial complex and the exploitation of prison labor. There can be no advocacy against slavery and involuntary servitude if we proliferate the very nature of these practices. While the use of “forced” labor may not be relevant here, the potential for exploitation—either intentional or by accident—is always present. “As far as I’m concerned, your days of working for nothing are done,” I said to Gerald.
The second is artistry. I’ve paid Scotty for works I’ve never used in a newspaper or book because I consider his work valuable, and him an artist, and, as such, compensate him accordingly. The drawings in Reimagining the Revolution could easily go for six figures at some of the Pier 39 galleries Gerald walked by on his way to work, but context is important. And while society may see the context of a gallery as heightening the value of a piece of art, I see the context in which incarcerated works are designed as reason to elevate prison art to an even higher level of worth. I see their boldness and their unwavering dedication to freedom as inspiring and awesome, in the biblical sense. It’s hard to put a price on that kind of context, but it’s worth at least throwing a few figures around.
Preface
When I started writing this book and interviewing the people it would include, I was often asked why. Why this topic? Why you?
It’s a valid question. The struggle for racial equality is a long one, seemingly endless. It has required miles of footwork, a deluge of bloodshed, and years of endurance to withstand the ebb and flow of social consciousness, political dysfunction, and surges of white rage. Why would anyone who isn’t tied to the movement by their cultural and sociopolitical identity ever volunteer to join?
My interest in struggles for liberation grew out of my understanding of collective humanity, informed by my Jewish ancestry. Early on in life, I connected far more with the human race than I did a white race. My Jewish grandparents were not considered “white”; neither were their Irish neighbors, although the descendants of these generations were. This informed me that race can be flexible. With near arbitrary parameters, the social construction that is race cannot possibly be an excuse to disengage from the struggle for liberation. So when asked why, my usual response is “Why wouldn’t I?”
This book is my attempt to ensure that the atrocities humans inflict on each other—whether enslavement, genocide, or imprisonment—never fill another museum or warrant another memorial. If you see humanity as a connection to the human race, it is incumbent upon you to speak out against injustice inflicted upon your fellow human. Staying out of the fray will provide shelter for only so long. When they come for you, your justice will be sought by the people you fight for now.
Decisions
My journey into the revolution began when the grassroots organization All of Us or None hired me to write a newspaper amplifying the voices of currently and formerly incarcerated people. The majority of my career had been in journalism, but after covering the criminal legal system as a beat reporter, I felt a need to push for change in a less objective manner.
By May 2020 I had a pretty solid rhythm going with the paper. Every month I’d gather stories from traumatized individuals who had been seen as society’s monsters and treated accordingly. I’d weave their pained statements into dense articles, connecting their present-day tribulations to distant court rulings and political pivots that could provide clues on how to target the next reform and prevent the next injustice. The articles were placed alongside statistical graphics, photographs of the organization’s demonstrations, and intricate drawings made by incarcerated artists with colored pencils, watercolors, and ink pens. I’d pay a couple of editor friends out-of-pocket to put eyes on it, and finally, I’d print out each page on 11 × 17-inch paper to make “proofs”—a publishing term for hardcopy drafts laid out for review before the pages go to press.
