“Art is a form of freedom”

This exhibition results from a collaborative project that brought works of art from the museum’s collection into classrooms at Whitworth Women’s Facility, a prison in north Georgia. The incarcerated women there selected the works in this exhibition and wrote prose and poetry in response to them. This interinstitutional project seeks to cultivate community and empathetic connection through art and writing, despite vast differences in space, time and resources.

Since 2021, Callan Steinmann, curator of education at the museum, has worked with Caroline Young, lecturer of English at the University of Georgia and site director for the Common Good Atlanta program at Whitworth Women’s Facility, on the project. Common Good Atlanta, founded in 2010, provides people who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated with access to higher education by connecting Georgia’s colleges and professors with Georgia’s prison classrooms. Its Clemente Course in the Humanities offers students college credit through Bard College in subjects like critical thinking and writing, literature, U.S. history, philosophy and art history. Dr. Young’s UGA service-learning English course “Writing for Social Justice: The Prison Writing Project” linked the museum to the incarcerated students in Clemente classes at Whitworth Women’s Facility.

Over the course of several semesters in 2021 and 2022, Young’s students considered how they might bring a museum experience to incarcerated women at Whitworth Women’s Facility. They learned about the museum’s collection and selected over 140 works of art to share with Whitworth Women’s Facility students through art kits that included high-quality reproductions of each work of art, information about the artist, relevant historical context and questions to prompt reflections and interpretation. The UGA students sought to represent the diversity of the collection in their selections while highlighting artists historically excluded from the mainstream art historical narrative.

Starting in the fall of 2021, Common Good Atlanta Clemente instructors Don Chambers and Caroline Young integrated these art kits into their course curriculum at Whitworth Women’s Facility. Incarcerated students there engaged with the art from the museum’s collection through close looking, discussion, creative writing and art making. Through these explorations, women at Whitworth Women’s Facility narrowed down a selection of works of art that were personally meaningful and resonant for them. The works they chose and the writing that accompanies them relate to themes of identity, motherhood, incarceration, home, childhood, social issues, memory and mysteries. Viewed together, these works question and challenge the ways in which art and educational institutions can foster or hinder societal awareness and social equity and offer new ways to understand the far-reaching impacts of higher education in the carceral system.