Far Beyond the Walls
Contemporary Art Exhibitions at the recently decommissioned
Nevada State Maximum Security Prison
Exhibition 22 June - 12 October 2024
Nevada State Prison yard - photograph by Frances Melhop
These deeply immersive exhibitions involve more than 35 artists, 7 solo exhibitions and 2 group shows. They take place within the cell housing, medical and culinary spaces of the historic and recently decommissioned Nevada State Prison in Carson City, Nevada.
The objective and intention of this exhibition is to move public awareness towards an understanding of the issues surrounding incarceration in the US, both historically and currently.
Visitors will experience aspects of this collective societal issue through the eyes of formerly incarcerated individuals and artists responding to the prison spaces through their own prisms and perspectives.
Our aim is to humanize those directly affected and open transformative channels for dialog.
FAR BEYOND THE WALLS CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Far Beyond the Walls exhibition, is a collaboration between the Nevada State Prison Preservation Society, curator Frances Melhop, and Melhop Gallery º7077. Together we open a conversation by shining a beam of light on the topic of incarceration. With more than 2 million people behind bars in the USA, this is a growing situation that needs to be acknowledged, thought about, and reframed.
This project began to germinate in 2020 when friend and historian, Lisa Jayne, asked me to photograph the decommissioned Nevada State Prison for a research project she was working on. During the day of photography, through the intense experience of the silent prison spaces and grounds, the extreme desert heat and lack of humidity, and stories from a former guard, I was deeply affected by the place.
Over the following months the kernel of an idea for an exhibition began to develop. It couldn’t be an ordinary white cube commercial exhibition, it had to be relevant, experiential, and contextual. I began to research the issue and discover artists working with incarceration as a major theme.
The artists selected approach the subject from various perspectives and backgrounds. The idea is not to create a didactic exhibition but to show artists’ responses to the mass incarceration situation in the US through various art mediums, and fields of view, while giving visitors the opportunity to also experience physical carceral spaces and potentially expand or transform preconceived ideas regarding humans in captivity.
The 1859 Nevada State Prison history, transitions, and modifications of historic buildings for imprisonment purposes is fascinating and haunting. The original wooden building was built as a hotel at a hot-springs, repurposed and rebuilt with stone as a functioning prison with guards and wardens. Finally becoming understood to be an extremely cramped, outdated complex, it was decommissioned in 2012, with the final execution being scheduled there as recently as 2017.
While researching for this exhibition and project it became evident to me that art making while inside became a way to express humanity, individuality and identity while also being a survival mechanism to endure the clock with no hands.
Far Beyond the Walls is an immersive series of conceptual exhibitions within the actual cells and cell blocks, medical area, and culinary section of the decommissioned Nevada State prison. Each artist occupies and transform an area inside the prison complex, drawing the viewers’ attention to specific topics and concerns in relation to the US prison industrial complex. The 25 artists include formerly incarcerated persons, a former criminal defense Lawyer who worked with people on death row inside this prison, sculptors, photographers, painters, social justice artists, several poets, (incarcerated and formerly incarcerated) and a soundscape artist, along with a group show of works by currently incarcerated people.
The exhibitions are held concurrently in separate historic areas of the prison complex, each area chosen for the relevance to the work of each artist, while also creating an opportunity for viewers to explore, understand and experience the historic building. At the same time visitors will gain an insight into how the carceral space was used, and what it feels like inside these confined spaces.
PRESS
Far Beyond the Walls exhibition features
CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS - SOLO EXHIBITIONS - FAR BEYOND THE WALLS
Jennifer Garza-Cuen, photo by Asa Gilmore
Imprints & Abstractions by Jennifer Garza-Cuen
Photographer Jennifer Garza-Cuen’s work explores the longstanding relationship
of photography to a process of aesthetic criminalization. Working with archival press photos, ruined mugshots, and arrest record print documents found in an abandoned police station in Detroit, she recontextualizes our relationship to criminal documentation and invites us to consider our role. “These images serve as a counterpoint to the fetishization of mugshots, individuals are no longer being recriminalized, rather they are absorbed into the larger narrative of a place that criminalized them. The photographs are part of a physical and chemical collapse, which now obscures the very thing they were created to preserve, the identity of the accused.
Other Side of the Wall by Giampiero Assumma
Other Side of the Wall is a long term photographic project, (2001-2014), looking at mental illness within the context of the six last, fully functioning “secured criminal psychiatric facilities” in Italy.
Over the course of several years, he photographed inside working asylum penitentiaries in Italy to produce this series Other Side of the Wall. Cautiously, respectfully, and with deep thought he recorded the spaces, the inmates and the deep sense of trauma and emotions that inhabit these intense places.
The work represents an insight into the inmates’ lives and the reality of these asylums. The photos display a certain narrative style, aiming to make mental issues a visually accessible condition as well as offering a constructive contribution to the debate on psychiatric institutions and social exclusion.”
These facilities were eventually shut down in 2015.
Born in Naples in 1969, Assumma is a documentary and fine-art photographer. His work comprises many long term projects that offer their own constructive interpretation of the human condition.
Assumma’s photographs are marked with an existentialist character, and often explore borders and outer-limit experiences.
Alienation, faith, addictions, and rituals are recurring themes throughout his series.
He is currently based in Moscow.
Off Record - Lisa Jarrett
Lisa Jarrett (she/her) is an artist working in social and visual forms. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings including: schools, land- scapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and prisms. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions; the most urgent of which is:
What will set you free?
She is co-founder/director of projects like KSMoCA (Dr MLK Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art); the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice in NE Portland, OR; and Art 25: Art in the 25th Century.
Lisa exists and makes work within the African Diaspora. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she co-authors social practice projects and continues her 14+ year investigation into Black hair and its care in various forms. She is Associate Professor of Community and Context Arts at Portland State University's School of Art + Design where she teaches classes in Art + Social Practice.
My practice has long considered the politics of difference across space and time. In the ongoing series Migration Studies, I continue to explore migratory systems and streams and the way that it forms (or is conversant with) Black femininity’s relationship to hair and beauty routines. Migration, forced or chosen, has been a defining force in the formation of Black identities. In the Migration Studies project Black hair and the attendant products and rituals are my primary materials. I often engage these materials to trace lost histories and homelands and to chart future trajectories. Which is to say the work is actively constructing future narratives reliant on Black life today. I often think about “migration” and its relationship to narratives about liberation and freedom. I also consider it in terms of vast possibilities for a Black body to re-situate itself across space and time. However, in the context of women incarcerated within the US prison-industrial complex physical migration is limited by both space and time. How then does Black hair perform on the inside? What shapes our beauty with limited access to resources for care like the Beauty Supply and salon? What knowing do we carry with us and how does it keep us safe? What hair rituals existed for Black women incarcerated at the Nevada State Prison and how do they echo our collective migratory journeys? This work is a monument to those women in recognition of the tenderness and care that most certainly was present in addition to whatever else.
Red Buddha, Giclee on German Etching Paper, 39.37” x 39.37” (100cm x 100cm) Edition of 10
Kevin Barron, photo by David Elalouf
Alchemy - LSD Blotter Art and Collages by Kevin Barron
An Art School graduate from the late 1960s, Kevin Barron has been a practicing visual artist for nearly six decades. A brief hiatus from his artwork in the early 1970s took him into the world of popular music, working for Cat Stevens and touring with the Rolling Stones.
His art form, two-dimensional, has taken on different formats over the years but his primary focus has been in the field of psychedelic art and more specifically the rare and unusual LSD blotter. He sees this conceptual art form as both literally and figuratively the highest example of psychedelic art. “What other art form can you observe a minute image on a tiny square of paper, which once ingested takes the consumer on a mind-expanding journey?”
The overall micro/macro experience can be seen in his current artwork which uses the blotter art concept as a template for his imagery. Kevin is considered to be one of the few great living blotter artists and original and rare examples of his blotter are treasured by avid collectors and highly valued.
Barron’s work has been exhibited in London, Paris, Ibiza and the U.S.A.
His first book: BLOTTO, Adventures and Misadventures in Psychedelia was published in the UK in Spring of 2024.
You can find BLOTTO here
Installation view of Viraccocha, LSD Blotter Art by Kevin Barron in the Maximum Security Housing.
P2P Prisoners to Paperdolls series by Glynn Cartledge. Oil on canvas.
P2P Prisoners to Paper Dolls by Glynn Cartledge
Glynn Cartledge is an artist who spent twenty-five years working as a criminal lawyer, her work explores the front end and the back end of incarceration — the time spent awaiting adjudication of charges and the reentry process after incarceration. Her current series P2P is a compilation of oil portraits of formerly incarcerated individuals. Archival criminal and personal documents, family photographs, and recorded historical transcriptions and other sound recordings, along with collaged jail cells, provide context.
One in three adults in America has a criminal record, over 24 million have been convicted of felonies and we currently lock up over 2.3 million citizens, 95% of whom will be released. An artist and former criminal defense lawyer, Glynn interrogates the criminal justice system, the aesthetics of guilt, and the ways in which conviction follows us beyond the point of penalty. With portraits of formerly incarcerated citizens, multimedia jail cell collages, painted floor cloths reimagined as prison rugs, and recorded firsthand accounts, she draws upon her experience as an attorney to explore the precarious world of incarceration, reentry, and recidivism.
She paints portraits of formerly incarcerated citizens as if they were mere paper dolls using the history of paper dolls as a metaphor for the contemporary condition of the formerly incarcerated. Paper dolls became a phenomenon in America over 200 years ago and continue today. These stereotypical interpretations of personages were marketed to the poor in paperback books as temporary toys. Thus her paper doll oil portraits, on canvases sized for their book-like proportions, likens the way we view ex-prisoners to the way children see and utilize paper dolls.
Her collages of jail cells address the emotionality of living in a county detention facility where everyone arrested (guilty or innocent) resides together. Glynn uses archival materials from the formerly incarcerated, documents from her own files, and other everyday materials to depict images of life in a 6’ by 8’ room with a toilet, sink, and a low profile mattress. Her hope is that these poetic abstractions convey how those accused face otherness and isolation, whether guilty or innocent, and whether the crime is minor or major.
Her Carceral Cloths are unstretched cotton duck canvases painted with oil that reimagine early, immigrant floor cloths as contemporary prison rugs. These cloths made for the floor echo spatial limitations of prisons and emphasize the meaningfulness of institutional colors. She designs the front pattern of the cloth using symbolic images of incarceration and puts a call for action on the back. These Carceral Cloths link poverty to incarceration and suggest the ways in which incarceration follows us home.
Gia Dreyer in collaboration with Glynn Cartledge produced the haunting P2P soundscape
Gia Dreyer (b. 2000) is a queer, non-binary composer from New Jersey. Gia attended Duke University and the Royal Academy of Music, where they studied music composition. Their approach to composition engages with the experience of the Other manifest in regimes of exclusion and manipulation that displace marginalized identities. Recent debuts of their work and research include the Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency, the Vienna Summer Music Festival, and the Atlantic Music Festival. Currently, they are pursuing a dual master’s degree in music composition and music theory at Hunter College in NYC.
Glynn Cartledge
Collaborators
I want to thank the following individuals; without whom, this exhibition would not be possible. I am grateful and humbled by their generous contributions.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, Amaya Keir Rodriguez, Tessa Clawson, Johnny Bailey, Jennifer Pearse, Billy Copeland, George White, Jerrod Brown, Nicole Thompson, Bobby Regaldo, John Arthur, and Ramon Garcia.
Gia Dreyer
Ismael Santillanes
INDELICATE ANGELS - Ismael Santillanes
Ismael Santillanes is a poet, an artist, and a desert dweller. His poetic mindset is xeric, trying to water only those words that need be said. His artistic vision comes from the faces he conjures to the surface. So mote it be.
For the first five years in prison, nothing more closely describes my life as this: I existed. Nothing more. Then I met Gary, incarcerated by then for many years. One day, out for a walk around the prison yard, he pointed out someone whose eyes were lifeless. He pointed out the head tilt, the Buglar-stained fingers, the endemic lifer’s coffee mug, how he moved past others without being noticed. As far as Gary could determine, our subject was walking around without a soul. Then Gary predicted quite honestly, “If you don’t change, you’ll end up like that.” There has been no stronger a catharsis for me to change.
Poet Ismael García Santillanes a self-named American pocho, meaning poached ; or only half cooked, gives us a deeply personal verse biography through captivating and intertwined poems. It is the story of a boy who picks cotton and writes I hate this work: this unforgiving damnation/ It reminds me how poor we are/ and how poor people/ have to sell their muscle at minimum wage ... Yet these are not only stanzas of redemption. These are unique and revealing poems, where the images of the past merge seamlessly into the never-ending life of an imprisoned present. --Emma Sepúlveda, poet and writer
You can find INDELICATE ANGELS here
Nevada’s Poet Laureate Shaun Griffin
No Charity in the Wilderness poems + Razorwire published by Shaun Griffin
Shaun Griffin was the co-founder and former director of Community Chest, a non-profit agency serving children and families in northwestern Nevada since 1991, and the former founding director of the state’s homeless youth education office. Shaun has spent a lifetime trying to build bridges where there were none for all members of the human community.
For thirty years Griffin has taught a poetry workshop at Northern Nevada Correctional Center and published a biennial journal of their work, Razor Wire. He regularly contributes poetry, essays, and translations to literary journals, and was editor-at-large at Calapooya and contributing editor at Weber Studies. He is the author of six books of poetry, editor of two anthologies, a memoir, a book of essays, and translator of a book of poems.
Griffin’s most recently published book is titled No Charity in the Wilderness, some poems from this book will be included in Far Beyond the Walls.
No Charity in the Wilderness is a long journey into the new American West. From the southern border to the isolating two-lane highways in the desert, this collection is a prayer of reconciliation with so much that troubles us—those who live without resources or voices—and their possible future in this ever-changing landscape of desire.
Shaun Griffin has recently been honored as Nevada’s Poet Laureate
You can find No Charity in the Wilderness, here
Corner Colonies by Roman de Salvo
There is a brutalist three-dimensional grid of stacked concrete waffles at my alma mater known as the Applied Physics & Mathematics building, the architecture being the perfect exemplification of that discipline, circa 1969. This is where I had my first sighting of a cliff swallow colony. Within the cells of the waffled concrete eves, a hundred feet up and cantilevered well beyond the building’s footprint, I noticed the nests. The Euclidian precision of the structure was infested!
Years later, I got a much closer view of cliff swallow nests clustered around the concrete columns of a bridge. I was close enough to admire the biomorphic vessel-like forms and marvel at the texture of the nests, the product of a consistent technique of the birds spitting mouthfuls of mud, course after course, and an unimaginable number of flights to the mud source. The swallows, I thought, were remarkable potters! Their pottery is their architecture!
One day, it occurred to me that I might be able to make pseudo swallow colonies using the potter’s wheel. When I installed the first of these in the ceiling corner of my hallway, I discovered that I couldn’t ignore it. I have many artworks and artifacts that I live with. They are framed, hung conventionally on walls, displayed on shelves or tables. I’m fond of them, but sometimes—I admit—don’t really notice them. In contrast, the Corner Colony, located where nothing should be, seems to trip a perceptual trigger in an area of the brain where instinct governs. I catch it in my peripheral vision and must pay attention. It’s really a kind of irritant in that way. Yet, another region of my brain knows that this is my homage to cliff swallow dwellings, which still seems to conjure the kinds of thoughts and feelings I’ve had about them.
—Roman de Salvo, 2024
Roman de Salvo is a sculptor and public artist who works with ordinary materials in everyday contexts. His work often involves energetic phenomena, such as wind, water, fire, electricity, and audience participation, as well as elements of intrigue and surprise. Since 2005, de Salvo has been making large-scale works for public parks, such as The Riparium for Ruocco Park in downtown San Diego, and Fountain Mountain at Mission Trails Regional Park in San Diego County. Noteworthy exhibitions in which de Salvo’s work has been featured include the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the 2002 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, American Idyll for the Public Art Fund in New York, Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast in Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum, Insite 2000 in Tijuana, Mexico, and Giverny Garden Projects at the Musée d'Art Américain, Giverny, France. Born in San Francisco in 1965 and raised in Reno, de Salvo received the B.F.A. in Sculpture in 1990 from the California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland and the M.F.A. in Visual Arts in 1995 from the University of California, San Diego. He has been affiliated with the UNR Lake Tahoe Low Residency MFA-IA since 2016. In 2022, he relocated to Reno and began working in ceramics.
Prison Images & Convicts by Harun Farocki
Video work will be shown by Harun Farocki with kind thanks to Antje Ehemann and the Harun Farocki Institut, Berlin, Germany.
In 1976, the filmmaker and writer Harun Farocki (1944–2014) envisioned an institution that ‘we can also organize’ as ‘an assembly of working people, not from an abstract understanding but from the contact points of their work’. The Harun Farocki Institut (HaFI), founded in September 2015 as a non-profit organisation, seeks to realise Farocki’s proposal in the shape of a platform for researching his visual and discursive practice and supporting new projects that engage with the past, present and the future of image cultures.
Doll Trailer 3 by Ashley Brock 2023
Height 58”, width 48”, depth 10.” Lumber, stretcher bar, mdf, wood panelling, acrylic paint, LED lights, floral fabric, and artificial grass.
Breeding Entropy series by Ashley Brock
Influenced by the transient nature of life, Nevada-based artist Ashley Brock draws inspiration from everyday observations and experiences. She works primarily with abandoned or discarded objects found in proximity, using her practice to explore complex relationships between self and other. She received her BFA from the University of Nevada, Reno.
This work explores the complexities of familial relationships, the consequences of resistance in oppressive systems, and the arduous path towards healing and liberation. Each work serves as a reflection on the interplay between inherited narratives and individual agency.
Resilience emerges as a theme, weaving these narratives together.
Installation view of A lonely Buoy group poetry exhibition from a Maximum Security Cell
A lonely Buoy
GROUP POETRY EXHIBITION
We are very excited to include a group exhibition of poetry by poets that participated in the creative workshops with Shaun Griffin:
Sabin Barendt, Beau Brown, WIlliam J Connors III
John Fenton, John Garmon, Robert Gonzales,
Durrell Grier, John Harris, Greg Kovner,
Jack Sevana, and Laurence Taafe
Invisible Nation
a group exhibition of artwork by currently incarcerated inmates
from Lovelock and Northern Nevada Correctional facilities
100% of sales go to these artists’ commissary accounts.
Many thanks for coordinating this to Advocate for Incarcerated Inmates Teddie Craig
EXHIBITION ESSAY 1
SURVIVING THE CLOCK WITH NO HANDS
by Frances Melhop
He didn’t speak to me of evil
But the man showed me hell
When he said, “The excluded still wait….”[1]
From my own limited perspective and talks with formerly incarcerated people I have met and read about, there appear to be 3 options once imprisoned: fail to thrive, languish, and self-destruct, or become a super-human, bigger, stronger, faster more terrifying and unapproachable, able to endure anything like an invincible mountain, …and/or find ART.
I would like to focus on the third option…. find ART.
Jumping back in time to contextualize, it is important to note that when public torture and the gorey spectacle of punishment disappeared from Europe and America in the late 1700’s, it was supplanted by imprisonment, when the convicted person became completely invisible to the public. Their ability to choose, move, have options and individuality all removed. In effect erased. Out of sight out of mind…… continue reading here
EXHIBITION ESSAY 2
Women’s Incarceration – Trauma, Emotional Support, and Empowerment Through the Arts
by Jamie Leonard
In researching this paper – in reading the numbers and statistics, the vast array of opinions about what is wrong with our prison system, why change and reform is so challenging, and then worse, listening to the painful, personal stories of incarcerated women in all corners of the country – I could think of only one thing: I was somehow, despite everything, incredibly lucky. My mother was strong in so many ways. Still, she admitted to me in recent years that she was just too fearful to leave my emotionally, and sometimes physically, abusive stepfather. She was positive, as I am sure that countless abused women are, that if she left him, she would be destitute, homeless, caring alone for her five-year-old from her first marriage and her new infant, my half-sister, on her own with no money, no home, no prospects. Probably living in a bus station or under a bridge, or so she’d convinced herself. And so, she stayed….. continue reading here
EXHIBITION ESSAY 3
Woman is the Word:
Teaching Memoir-Writing in a Maximum-Security Women’s Prison.
by Courtney Polidori
When I was a graduate student in The College of New Jersey’s MA program in English, my mentor Dr. Michele Lise Tarter invited me to co-teach her prison memoir-writing program, Woman is the Word. Although I was not convinced that I possessed the courage to teach in a prison, when Michele told me how she had helped incarcerated women write their life stories for the past 15 years, I felt intrigued and accepted the opportunity to co-teach with her and another student, Samantha Zimbler. Within our prison classroom, women have handwritten memoirs about trauma and resilience, recited original poetry scarred by images of abuse, constructed art projects that negotiated with identity, discussed memory and imagination, loss and redemption, and crafted Christmas cards to send to their children. Since co-teaching Woman is the Word with her, I have participated in a range of educational programs at the prison, including developing and teaching my own college-credit course, leading writing workshops, and participating in college graduation ceremonies inside maximum-security. What have I learned? Although critics believe that education programs inside prisons should focus on vocational training, I have come to believe that teaching memoir-writing, literature, and the arts can help incarcerated women discover what Charlotte Perkins Gilman in The Yellow Wallpaper refers to as “imaginative power,” which leads to healing, empathy, rehabilitation, and opportunity.
On the first day of Woman is the Word, we pulled off Freedom Road into the parking lot of the prison and I glimpsed a palimpsest of pastoral imagery. Originally a farm, the prison grounds might pass for an underfunded college campus. Faded yellow brick buildings, some dating back to the 19th century, squatted atop cracked grey sidewalks and grass the color of overcooked asparagus. High metal fences strung with two strands of barbed wire fenced in certain buildings, including the maximum security compound where we headed to teach…… continue reading here
