In Prison Denim, the Heart of an Artist

It’s not your ordinary painting class, despite the funky art teacher dressed in black and the still life with fruit arranged on the table.

The class is often interrupted, sometimes canceled, as students up to their elbows in pastel dust are hauled away each time trouble erupts nearby.

The art teacher, Jill Ansell, carries a push-button alarm in case she is attacked.

Even paintbrushes pose a threat--”You could file them down and do all sorts of things,” said the art director--and must be carefully collected at the end of each session.

Still, a handful of men in the maximum-security yards at the state prison draw and paint and smudge the pastel lines with their fingers, conjuring up images of distant families, religious icons and panoramic landscapes they may never see again.

On Saturday night--although none of them was there to witness it--the first public exhibition of their work opened at a gallery run by the Workmen’s Circle, a Jewish social service center at 1525 S. Robertson Blvd. in Los Angeles. The free show will run through Sept. 1.

“It’s a way to say, ‘Hey, not everybody in here is an animal.’ People are doing more than just being gangsters,” said Mitchell Smiley, a 39-year-old inmate serving 15 years to life for second-degree murder.

Smiley is one of Ansell’s prize students, a self-taught painter with a graying beard who has been incarcerated for more than half his life. At least 10 of the paintings in the show are his, but Smiley’s most ornate canvas is his skin, emblazoned with intricate, blue tattoos.

Then there is Derrick Mosley, one of the newer students, who joined the class just a few months ago. Ansell is particularly proud of the shy, halting artist who liked to sketch Mickey Mouse cards in his cell but seemed unsure of his drawing ability. She taught him how to use pastels.

“It’s motivated me to stay in contact with my children,” said Mosley, 35, who is serving a life sentence for rape and robbery. He sends his artwork to his 10-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter.

For the past two years, Ansell has taught 6-hour classes twice a week at the all-male California State Prison in Lancaster. The California Arts Council, a state agency that funds artists in schools and other facilities, awarded her $12,600 annually to work as an artist in residence there. The grant is matched by $6,000 a year from Arts in Corrections, a prison program.

The 73 paintings now adorning the walls of the Workmen’s Circle are not for sale; the prison and its inmates are not permitted to profit from the art, said Leah Joki, who directs art programs at the Lancaster facility. Instead, the 20 artists can give their work to their families or donate it to the prison, to be auctioned in the fall to raise money for a nonprofit music camp in Palmdale.

Even so, some victims’ rights advocates do not think artwork by violent felons should be displayed to the public at all.

“That creates sympathy for the prisoner,” said Harriet Salarno, president of Crime Victims United of California, whose daughter was murdered in 1979. “The public doesn’t know what that prisoner did . . . or what happened to the victim’s family.”

Eric Gordon, the gallery’s director, said the Workmen’s Circle often displays art highlighting social issues such as immigration and homelessness. An all-inmate art show, he said, “just seemed to fit.”

“We want to show that we don’t just lock people up and throw away the keys,” Gordon said. “Their humanity remains.”