The value of higher education in the prison system has been debated in politics for decades. While higher education was once rarely available to incarcerated people in Georgia, that is no longer the case thanks to nonprofits like Common Good Atlanta and their collaborative work with dedicated educators and prisons across the state. A new exhibition at the museum, “Art is a form of freedom,” sheds light on this topic in more detail and highlights why advocates have continued their work so fervently in recent years.
Common Good Atlanta, which 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, began in earnest with one Georgia State University Ph.D. student’s personal connection to the prison system. According to Common Good Atlanta’s website:
Common Good Atlanta began in 2008, with one Ph.D. student, Sarah Higinbotham, who felt called to volunteer to teach at a prison as a response to her uncle’s incarceration. After writing 14 Georgia prisons, Phillips State Prison finally accepted her offer to teach a course. That semester, Sarah provided all the books for the course on world literature. The class filled in 20 minutes, with 90 incarcerated men on the waiting list.In 2010, after two years of teaching by herself, her graduate school friend Bill Taft joined the work. Together, they co-direct Common Good Atlanta, which has grown to more than 60 faculty members teaching over 35 courses across four prisons.
Over a decade later, Common Good Atlanta’s efforts and programs have only grown and this exhibition is just one of many examples of their work around the state.
The exhibition, which opens this month and is on view until July, is the result of a collaborative project that Callan Steinmann, Georgia Museum of Art curator of education, and Caroline Young, UGA English lecturer, have worked on since 2021. Young’s UGA service-learning English course, “Writing for Social Justice: The Prison Writing Project,” connected the museum to incarcerated students in Common Good Atlanta’s Clemente classes at Whitworth Women’s Facility.
Young’s UGA students considered how they might bring the museum experience to the incarcerated women at the north Georgia prison for women. Over the course of several semesters in 2021 and 2022, her students learned about the museum’s collection. They then chose a selection of artists who were historically excluded from the mainstream art historical narrative and shared those 140 works of art with the 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.
For those who have dedicated their lives to this work, the results are obvious–higher education can have positive outcomes and ultimately be transformative and life-saving for those who are incarcerated. This exhibition is one way that the outcome of their advocacy can be seen and understood by others.
“As I’ve been working on this project over the past few years, I keep returning to an idea that one of my grad school professors, Dr. Paul Bolin, first introduced to me: That art is both a window and a mirror, said Steinmann. “I believe that art can be a portal, allowing us to peer into and perhaps understand others’ lived experiences, and it’s also a reflection of the time the work was made and of ourselves as we view it.”
This project has not only provided the women at Whitworth Women’s Facility with the chance to cultivate their minds but also to cultivate their identities. Incarcerated students purposefully picked the selections that will be featured in the exhibition by actively looking at and discussing the works of art that personally resonated with them.
To further engage with the art, the incarcerated students also wrote prose and poetry in response, relating themes of identity, motherhood, incarceration, home, childhood, social issue, memory and mysteries. “When viewed together, the works of art and the women’s writing tell a compelling story about the power of art to connect people across space and time,” she added.
“I hope that this exhibition invites viewers to connect and empathize with the women at Whitworth Women’s Facility through the art they chose and their writing,” said Steinmann. “I also hope that it encourages visitors to consider the implications of mass incarceration on individuals and our society more broadly.”
“Art is a form of freedom” will be on display at the museum from March 4 through July 2, 2023. There will also be a curator talk by Steinmann on March 29 at 2 p.m.
Authored by:
Elizabeth Benavides
