Releasing the Artist Within

A prison art studio might sound like a contradiction in terms, but to Beth Thielen, an artist who teaches book arts and printmaking at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, it makes exquisite sense. “When people lose their freedom,” she explains, “they understand the power of art.”

Thielen, 43, has been teaching art in California prisons for a decade through grants from the California Arts Council and the state Arts in Corrections programs. Her prints and handmade books are in the collections of major museums and libraries, but it is in humble rooms such as this that she shares her gift and claims to receive just as much in return. “The earnest intensity of vision and effort that happens here is very compelling,” she says.

The physical environment of the California Rehabilitation Center is itself a contradiction. It was built in the 1920s as a luxury resort, but no amount of faded grandeur disguises the fact that this is a prison. A double fence crowned with razor wire surrounds the perimeter. Only ugly stumps remain of the numerous trees that once shaded the men’s barracks--a dire transformation necessitated by a recent escape attempt. A medium security prison, CRC houses 5,000 inmates, 909 of them women.

All fifteen of the women inmates in Thielen’s Tuesday night class are “N numbers,” meaning they are incarcerated for various narcotics violations. They are dressed in drab prison blues, albeit with touches of charm and femininity: beaded earrings and pendants, French braids. Their faces bring to mind Dorothea Lange’s WPA photos of migrant women: beauty tempered by hard times. Though the room frequently fills with laughter, the images in their artwork refer to lives informed by poverty and trauma.

“That’s my heart shot out three times, but still intact,” says Tiger Richardson, 35, eyeing a print just off the press. “Here’s my artwork,” volunteers Theresa Davis, 39. “See the teapot? The martini glass? It’s sort of a true story of my life. That’s how I got here. I tried to commit suicide. It had a lot to do with alcohol.” Talk to these women and you will learn about a son who died, a companion who overdosed, children who have been adopted away. “Everyone’s life in here is tragic,” Richardson comments simply.

If tragedy has stalked these lives, some of the resources that eluded them on the outside are now available to them in prison. “Prison bonds come up,” Thielen says, “and we’re just ready to lock ‘em up. We’re willing to pay for in prisons what we won’t pay for in neighborhoods: the job training, the counseling, the art classes. It’s ironic, it’s perverse.”

(Since the early 1980s, California has undertaken the largest prison building program in the United States. The fastest rising category of offenders, now 26% of the prison population, is drug violators, state officials say.)

Inside the small art studio, there’s a palpable sense of community. Inmates appraise one another’s work, offer encouragement. In the prison at large, there is “massive confusion,” Davis says. “We’re all put together with people we don’t know.” In the art room, “we can relax and be ourselves.”

Many of the women know each other from their prison jobs, dorms or their participation in the Native American sweat lodge.

“People who choose to do the art class are drawn to a spiritual path,” Davis says. “Because without spirit, I don’t think you’re going to make it--no matter what you do.”

Sue Adamson, 41, working carefully on her print of a chained bird, adds: “This means a lot to me because I have to get up and go to work in the kitchen at 3 in the morning. I don’t care how tired I’m going to be, I’m still going to be here.”

From a survey of the participants’ artwork, it’s apparent that the revelations that happen in this room are hard-won. Debra Goodrich, 41, also known as Little Feather, corroborates that perception. “You really have to dig,” she says. “Most of us are addicts, and in that addiction we’re hiding things we don’t want to face. We’re masking the pain, and when you’re clean and sober and come to this class, you’ve got to pull it up and look at it. You’re never going to heal unless you do.”

Little Feather grew up in a logging town near Mt. Shasta. “I was the youngest of five, and my family broke up when I was young. My mother was mentally ill. I felt like I was excess baggage and that nobody cared, and so I didn’t care.” Little Feather’s image is a self-portrait, her strong face concealed behind a brick wall.

The inmates learn printmaking on cardboard plates, which they layer with sandpaper, cloth and glue, then carve. The plates are inked and run through the press. “The technical quality, the structure of the printmaking process is a container to hold all those strong emotions,” Thielen says. For the final project, the class will create a handmade book of the inmates’ prints and their poems. Each participant receives a copy.

“These art classes, I tell you, they’ve changed my way of thinking,” Davis says. “I see things differently. Through all the drug use, it seemed like I got this hard casing. But I knew that I was good inside, and through the art I was able to bring that out . . . and now I feel softer. I know today that I don’t have to be right. Because that’s how it is with addicts, we have to be right. Beth has taught us a lot.

“She showed me how to draw. I couldn’t draw a stick person when I got here. And she showed me how to use different dimensions, how to put the ink on there. She told me she wanted more. I just started with this teapot. First, I was just going to start with the happiness I’m starting to feel. And she said, ‘No, no. Get a little deeper than the happiness.’ ” She laughs. “So I did. I got way deeper than the happiness. I went way deeper to the Edgar Allan Poe side, and to Jesus.”

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Thielen, a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, is part of a school of American artists whose work is grounded in social issues. These activist artists have historical roots in FDR’s Works Progress Administration. Many came of age in the politically charged ‘60s and ‘70s, influenced by the feminist art movement that connected art-making to action in the community.

Artists working to effect social change include performance artists making theater with the homeless, photographers teaching street kids to document their lives and writers teaching poetry in battered women’s shelters. The common denominator is the belief in the power of art to help people make positive changes in their lives, to encourage self-expression and self-representation.

Jim Carlson, former director of the state’s Arts in Corrections program and now an arts administrator at California State Prison in Sacramento, reminds critics of prison art programs that 95% of the inmates in state prisons are “going to be back in your neighborhood.” Exposure to the arts while in prison can help those inmates to learn discipline, cooperation and, in the words of one CRC inmate, “to develop a conscience.”

Gail Gutierrez-McDermid, director of Arts in Corrections, notes that the mentorship of a professional fine artist “exposes inmates to another way of looking at the world.”

Thielen works with male as well as female inmates. At Norco, 500 inmates--10% of the population--apply to the arts programs, which include creative writing, music, video production, theater and painting workshops. Half are accepted, half are on waiting lists.

Warden Raymond L. Middleton is clearly pleased with the arts workshops. “So much of what we do focuses on security and is very structured,” he says. “It’s important to include a creative component and very exciting that a person with Beth Thielen’s talents serves as an inspiration for the inmates.”

If Thielen inspires the inmates, the reverse is true as well. A show of Thielen’s work now on view at the Art Works Gallery in Riverside includes striking portraits based on archival mug shots of women incarcerated at San Quentin in the 1920s and ‘30s. An associate warden at the California Institute for Women brought the photos to Thielen’s attention several years ago. They had been stashed in a basement in a cardboard box that was mildewing.

The artist photographed the originals and then created monoprints and paintings from them. “I can’t sit down and draw the women in my classes, but these photos can substitute,” Thielen explains.

In one print, a haggard woman’s huge, dark eyes stare out with a stunning hopelessness. Along with her serial number, we learn her age--27--and her crime: bigamy. “What I know about these women is so different from the stereotypes of prisoners. I want to provide a more empathetic view,” the artist says. “I want to get these women out.”