Creativity Behind Bars : Art: Exhibit shows that ingenuity and the will to create thrive behind walls of state prison on Otay Mesa.

The sun seems to have ironed the fields flat where the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility stands, near the Otay Mesa border crossing between the U.S. and Mexico. Hills encircle the site, which goes by the unyielding name of Rock Mountain. It’s a frontier, stark and dry, populated by prisoners rather than pioneers.

Yet ingenuity and creativity thrive behind those bars, as can be seen both in the weapons that inmates fashion from materials at hand and in the art they make in a statewide Arts-in-Corrections program. Examples of each are on view in the exhibition, “Correct Art,” at Grossmont College’s Hyde Gallery and Palomar College’s Boehm Gallery.

The weapons, called “shanks,” show a startling resourcefulness--a toothbrush with a blade taped to one end, a crude chunk of wood with a protruding nail, a metal rod from a typewriter, sharpened to a point.

The paintings, ceramics, prints and hand-made books by inmates statewide are also creative, but seem to derive from a different world. They reflect little of the hostility and subversive violence of the makeshift weapons. More often they refer to the calm realm of the mundane, a world of gardens, families and food, rendered in styles ranging from vivid realism to pure abstraction. In their art, fond memories and hopes command more of the inmates’ attention than the persistent brutality of prison life.

“They come to the classes to get away from that, to escape,” said David Beck-Brown, administrator of the Arts-in-Corrections (AIC) program at the Donovan facility, organizer of the current exhibition and an artist himself.

The sobering environment “inside” compels many of the prisoners here to focus their attention on what awaits them “outside.”

“One hundred percent of the inmates here will get out someday. They’ll live next door. The experiences they learn here, they’ll bring to the outside,” Beck-Brown said.

With nearly 5,000 prisoners living in a facility built in 1987 to house 2,200, Beck-Brown says “There’s a potential for it to be a real pressure-cooker, so they need programs like this.”

The AIC program began in 1980 as a partnership between the state Department of Corrections and the California Arts Council. Its current budget of $2.4 million (funded by the Arts Council, local agencies like San Diego’s Commission for Arts and Culture and other sources) provides for classes in the visual and performing arts throughout the state’s 21 prisons.

Roughly 10% of the inmates at the Donovan facility choose to participate in the program. Classes, taught by local artists, meet year-round for three to nine hours a week.

Beck-Brown, who has administered and taught prison art programs since the late 1970s, says he enjoys the trust shown him by inmates. “This is one area in this culture where artists

are respected,” he said. But he has learned to keep his distance. He doesn’t talk to inmates about why they’re incarcerated, and he keeps a close watch over the tools used in class, to ensure that paintbrushes, rulers and scissors don’t quietly become transformed into shanks. Like many at the site, Beck-Brown wears a whistle clipped to his identification badge.

“The danger here for instructors is not physical, it’s emotional. The people here are really needy. If you give them a pencil, that gives them personal power. Getting close to them gives them power. You can’t get too close. We can’t forget where we are. There are good reasons for these rules,” Beck-Brown said.

After long deliberation, Beck-Brown admits that working inside the prison system has influenced his own artwork. His keen awareness of the lines between inside and outside worlds, and the rules that define them have made his work more precise, he says.

“Once an artist works inside, it becomes part of them. It’s like visiting a foreign land, or the dark ages.”

Naturally, the instructors aren’t the only ones deeply influenced by the experience. While Beck-Brown defends work made by inmates as art, not therapy, he cites statistics in several reports claiming that the Arts-in-Corrections program actually saves taxpayer money by reducing prison disciplinary action and lowering the rate of recidivism. The program builds self-esteem, he says, and gives inmates an “out” from peer pressure.

“The purpose of the program is not the product. It’s the knowledge. We’re not trying to create superstars.”

Nevertheless, several inmates have embarked on visible careers in art since participating in the AIC program. One inmate, who has taken classes for the past two years, now paints prolifically in his sliver of a cell, turning out 4-foot-square images of figures diving toward release. They pulsate like blasts of color and life in the otherwise dank, gray monotony of the cellblock.

He came into the Donovan facility as a pilot. He will leave an artist, he says. Why has he made such a commitment to art?

“It keeps me sane. It’s hard to imagine what I’d do without it. Jog, maybe, or dig a hole.”

Howard Fox, curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and guest juror of the “Correct Art” exhibition, gives the state penal system credit for allowing inmates an outlet for creative self-expression. Other social benefits are secondary, he said by telephone from L.A.

“I don’t think art needs to have a social mission or goal. It’s its own reward. If it has value as a social program, that’s in addition to its other value.”

Unlike the inmates themselves, who announce their status through tattoos or other features of dress and grooming, the art in the current exhibition does not blatantly proclaim itself as prison art. Much as in the prison environment itself, tensions remain buried beneath a veneer of technique, control and order. Only occasionally does the art afford a glimpse into a more troubled psychic state, in an image of a fleeing figure, for instance, or a wild cat caught in the glare of headlights, or masks trapped in separate, adjacent cells.

In jurying the show, however, Fox did detect some consistent features that linked the art to its setting.

“There’s a certain fluidity among the teachers that contrasted with a kind of directness and immediacy in the work of the students. I was impressed by the straightforwardness and the ardor of these expressions. I was also struck by a current that dealt with themes of innocence and guilt--not criminal, but larger human subject matter. There was landscape painting that was disarming in its directness, its longing for a better place to be. They’re not dealing with themes of Arcadia, but real human desire for something better, a longing for deliverance.”

Selecting the 85 works by inmates and instructors in the AIC program statewide was Fox’s first contact with art made in prisons. The exposure was eye-opening, he said.

“We think of prisoners as people who are behind bars, for whatever reasons. We think of them as numbers. This enabled me to see individual intelligence and imagination at work.”

“Correct Art” continues through Nov . 13 at the Hyde Gallery, Grossmont College, 8800 Grossmont College Drive, and Boehm Gallery, Palomar College, 1140 West Mission R oad , San Marcos. The Hyde Gallery is open weekdays 10-4. Boehm Gallery hours are Tuesday 10-4, Wednesday and Thursday 10-7, Friday 10-2 and Saturday 12-4. The show will also travel to San Francisco and Sacramento.

Howard Fox, juror of the show, will speak on “The Arts and the Common Good” at 4 p.m. Oct . 31 at the Kingston Hotel, 1055 1st Ave., as part of the California Confederation of Arts 16th Annual Statewide Congress. For more information about the free lecture, call (916) 447-7811. Additional artwork by inmates at the Donovan Correctional Facility will be on view at the hotel during the Congress.