Some of New York’s most interesting artists happen to be creating work outside the traditional art world — and inside the city’s correctional system.
For nearly a decade, New York City Health and Hospitals has been offering artmaking workshops with creative arts therapists to individuals incarcerated at Rikers Island. These sessions are part of mental health treatment offered by the hospital systems’ Correctional Health Services (CHS) program while detainees are awaiting trial or sentencing.
The jail facility, where 6,182 people were incarcerated as of August 2023, is run by the NYC Department of Correction, a different agency. The department’s decades of mismanagement, which has led to a spate of inmate injuries and deaths, has prompted activists to demand Rikers’s closure and federal prosecutors to ask a judge to shift oversight of the complex to another authority.
In the meantime, CHS’s art therapists have continued visiting patients at Rikers. Their artworks have been publicly exhibited only rarely, at the School of Visual Arts before the pandemic, until now. Woodhull Medical Center is displaying 24 original drawings, paper, and fabric pieces by 25 artists on the walls of the hospital’s main corridor under a Keith Haring mural created in 1986 after he was a patient there. The pieces are paired with a handful of selections from the public hospital system’s private collection of 7,000 artworks and will be up through March 2025.
The materials used by individuals incarcerated at Rikers are limited. Art therapists provide colored pencils, markers, paper, glue, collage images, and papier-mâché, and collect them once the session is over. But detainees don’t have access to scissors, aluminum foil, or cutting tools because they can be used as weapons.
Even though sessions are brief, occurring weekly in a communal dining room for an hour at a time, detainees work on projects that can take multiple weeks to complete. The workshops can help alleviate the sense of hopelessness that being imprisoned can provoke, art therapists said.
“When you’re looking at the exhibition, you may not be able to tell which were made by patients and which were from our permanent collection,” said Naomi Huth, director of NYC Health and Hospitals’s collection, who curated the exhibition. “No matter their background, everyone is going through struggles and experiences emotions, and art helps relieve their anxiety.”
Below, see some highlights from the public hospital system’s first-ever exhibition featuring artists incarcerated at Rikers Island. Note that artists’ last names are not printed for privacy reasons.
Andre A. “Untitled” (2022)
Andre A., who loves graphic novels, submitted four drawings created with colored pencils on coffee-stained sheets of paper featuring portraits of Superman, Godzilla, and King Kong.
“Life is a portrait, a total expression of journey, of viewing experiences, and hopes of perspectives of any realms,” Andre wrote in a statement accompanying his work.
In one of his most complex drawings, created during a single hour-long session, Andre playfully shaded multiple anime characters in a vibrant urban battle scene with multiple set pieces.
“It’s remarkable he’s able to draw these fights and muscles from memory,” Huth said.
His work was paired with a print by Charles Abramson titled “Ain’t Never Gonna Grow Old” (no date) print.
Audencio N., “Untitled” (2023)
Audencio frequently used his sessions to fill his sketchbooks, but when he wanted to create larger works, paper didn’t feel like the right material to use.
Instead, he requested Department of Correction brown inmate uniforms, which he transformed with colored markers and pencils into one-of-a-kind designs depicting intricate angel wings, red roses, and a beatific Our Lady of Guadalupe. The works were so stunning that other detainees wore them around the housing unit and the hospital added two designs to its permanent collection.
“He didn’t talk about his faith at length,” Jeff, a music therapist with CHS who declined to give his last name, said. “It wasn’t exclusively religious imagery. Some imagery speaks to his Mexican heritage.”
His work was paired with William Gatewood’s 1987 “October Kimono” that is also part of the hospital’s permanent collection.
George V., “Untitled” (2023)
George created one of the few sculptures in the exhibition, a colorful papier-mâché volcano in mid-explosion.
In a collaboration with his therapist during multiple sessions, George layered and shaped colored sheets of black, red, and orange, paper and glue representing laval careening down the sides of the craggy peak.
The original work is still displayed with several other works at a housing unit at the jail facility, but a photograph of the volcano is part of the exhibition.
George’s experience in art therapy helped shape the exhibition’s theme, “Creating Within.”
Carlos R., Erick F., Elvin N., and Naranja, “Who Am I?” and “Warrior Mask” (2023)
Mask-making is a key part of art therapy sessions because the process helps people explore their inner and outward experiences.
Merrill C., an art therapist with Rikers, brought papier-mâché masks in a neutral color which detainees painted with acrylic paint, watercolors, markers, and pencils, then added collaged images taken from magazines and affixed feathers.
“Typically I’ll talk about what do you imagine masks are used for,” Merrill said. “Masks are often used in how we project ourselves and how we are perceived.”
Keith G. (with assistance from Jose C., Leonides L., Tyshe N., and Sakr S.) “Flowers of Hope” (2022)
Keith’s mixed media piece “Flowers of Hope” started with a poem.
He told therapists he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do and one challenged him to make a visual representation from the words of a poem he wrote in his notebook.
Keith started crumpling pages of his notebook and gluing them on a larger canvas shaped like a flower pot. Then he added multi-colored layers of multi-colored papier-mâché to give his vase a rainbow look, and superimposed printed lines from his poem over each layer (a therapist printed out the lyrics for him).
Other inmates in his unit saw what he was doing and decided to help. The whole process took about a month and Keith ended up writing a song with another inmate about the work, which can be accessed by opening a QR code at his display at Woodhull.
“Flowers are like people: They’re delicate, beautiful, and unique. They need to be taken care of,” Keith wrote in a statement provided by Correctional Health Services that accompanied his work.
