Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We just heard about the unsafe conditions that many in detention at New York City's Rikers Island jail facilities are currently facing. As it turns out, not only are conditions that Rikers dangerous for people, they're also in-hospitable to art. Next month, New York City officials will vote whether or not to grant the request of Painter Faith Ringgold. She wants to have her painting for the women's house moved out of Rikers and to the Brooklyn Museum. The piece was originally made in 1972 for the women detained at Rikers Island.

Faith Ringgold: For the women's house was my first all women's painting. It was in a place where they went every day, just about, and they could pass it and see it. I wanted to make a contribution to these young women's lives to give them some hope because they're in prisons and to show them that the world is not so partially separate from their lives and their goals and their dreams than it appears.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That was Faith Ringgold speaking about the painting in 2010 when it was on display at Purchase College in New York. Now in recent years, the painting has not been easily visible to the women detained at Rikers, and according to Ringgold, it's not been properly maintained by the city. Professor Nicole Fleetwood told me that the situation with Ringgold's mural is deeply intertwined with the problems that exist at Rikers as a whole.

Nicole Fleetwood: We know Rikers is a failed institution. We know that many people have died at Rikers in a path year and that Rikers needs to be closed. I see moving that mural outside of Rikers as a reflection on how important it is, how urgent it is to close this death machine

Melissa Harris-Perry: Fleetwood is the inaugural James Waldon Johnson professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University and a 2021 McArthur Fellow. She's also the author of the book, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. She says it's important to understand that For the Woman's House was connected to a broader movement that existed between artists and incarcerated people in the early 1970s. A central part of that movement was an organization called the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, or BECC

Nicole Fleetwood: The BECC was founded by a group of New York-based artists and activists, including Benny Andrews, Faith Ringgold, Romare Bearden, Camille Billops, Norman Lewis, and others. In 1971, their mission really expanded in response to the Attica uprising. The members were really impacted by the demands of incarcerated protestors, especially to have more educational and cultural exchanges with none incarcerated people. By October of 1971, Faith Ringgold and others started volunteering and collaborating with incarcerated people in jails and prisons around New York City.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, the word exchange is key here. What BECC he was doing was not some type of charity. It was an attempt to shake up entire systems.

Nicole Fleetwood: There's this concept called threshold anxiety or threshold fear and it's about who's welcomed into institutions and who's forced into institutions. We can think of prisons as having a threshold and one that Black people are generally forced into, and museums as ones that Black people are generally excluded from. The work of BECC was actually to challenge both of those thresholds and to really think carefully about the links between museums and prisons as systems of value.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The groundwork laid by BECC is part of why a number of arts programs exist today in prisons and jails across the country.

Nicole Fleetwood: When they started to work in New York City jails and prisons in fall of '71, very shortly after that they started to expand and they expanded their programs across the state. Then other people started modeling programs around what BECC was doing. They initially called it the prison cultural exchange, and then they were able to get local funding and they evolved the program by '72 into a program called the Prison Arts Program.

Melissa Harris-Perry: One modern-day program that echoes BECC is run by the organization Mural Arts Philadelphia, and it's part of why Painter Russell Craig was able to create art while incarcerated

Russel Craig: Mural Arts of Philadelphia was active inside the jail and had a program in which inmates was painting murals and things like that and that gave us access to materials and having visitors come from the outside from mural artists like other artists and things like that. I was very fortunate. There was other on prisons that especially like in state prisons, like I heard that federal prisons have a more open art programs, if you will, or access to art materials and practices. I was pretty fortunate and then just basically being my own since that's what I chose.

There's a lot of things that incarcerated individuals do inside, we lift weights, play basketball, or whatever they choose to do. Art was all I did every day. For me, I was in my own world. Even if I didn't have extensive supplies, I would've just took my own because that's how I started with a pencil or whatever, and then I built it up to have in painting and things like that and started experimenting with different techniques and going to the library around the time when I got my GED to study art because I had a game plan to be an artist. Once I got out.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Russell says he had always fantasized about being an artist when he was growing up.

Russel Craig: It was like a dream to get out those streets to be like an artist because I always had an art interest ever since I was a kid that started from my own foster experience because I never had family and things like that. I was like the weird kid. I always was drawing. I reconnected with that once I got to prison and did the same thing. When I wounded up in prison, it became more serious.

It became like a game plan because I started to see the system and how it worked. I thought about that art would be my escape out, so I spoke about it for years and years and years, and for it to manifest, a lot of people use the word manifestation and that's pretty much because it was like a plan, a goal, a dream, but then also like manifesting to believe that I can go from where I was at to where I am now and where I'm going.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In 2016, I had the pleasure of curating an exhibit at the university where I teach. We exhibited a self-portrait made by Russell and we displayed it at the university. It's a piece that has stuck with me ever since and I asked him to explain how he created it.

Russel Craig: The majority of the work that I did inside was portraits of family members because had a business in which I would do portraits and things like that to stay alive in there because I never got visits, so like money on the books or letters or anything at. I was blessed to be able to figure it out to have that portrait business if you will. I didn't build a larger body for personal work, but as I was coming out and I was in a halfway house, I had did a self-portrait on some prison documents of mine and it was smaller. I started that in a halfway house, so I was still in captivity, one foot in one foot out.

To go into the details of the piece, I wanted to put my image on my prison documents to signify or basically speak to my experience and how it's behind me. You have the papers and then my face was over top, but then it was transparent. I used pastels because it had a transparent where you could still see the writings and things. What I was trying to like convey to the people is how this is behind me but the stigma of being a criminal is still in people's minds or whatever. You are reviewed as this criminal. Then when I did it bigger and Jesse Crimes had suggested that the one I did in the halfway house, it was smaller.

He was like, ''You should redo it. Do it bigger.'' I put it on four different canvas and the separation of the canvases gave it a cross hair like being targeted, like Black men targeted in America in the prison system and also with social injustice, about police brutality, and things like that. It was all kinds of targets that's put on it. I wanted to talk about that with the work. It was received very well. Now Hill Harper owns that piece. The Democratic National Convention displayed that piece. It traveled a bit and it got the attention of a lot of people and it really was a good start for my art career to be taken serious. I'm really appreciative of that piece.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Do you ever worry, Russell, that people will hear your story, know that you had access to some education, some materials, some opportunities, and think, ''Ah, prison must not be that bad. After all, you were able to create art and generate an art career on the other side''?

Russel Craig: That would be a misconception. If they think that it's okay, it's not. Prison is a very bad place because if you get into how it's run and white supremacy, the guard, the majority of them, and it's like this system is basically modern-day slavery. It really is and we can't get into the details. It's some dark issues of that or things that happen in prison that y'all not aware of. Again, I was fortunate to be in a prison that allowed us to do art because some prisons won't allow you to and take away programs and things.

The same prison I was in, Bernard Hopkins, he's a boxer from Philadelphia. They had a boxing program and then once he got out and started beating all these champs coming from prison, they stopped the program. There's a lot of jails they stop college because formerly incarcerated individuals was getting education and things like that. I would hate for them to think that art is such a good thing because then they'll take it away. It's good for us but it's like prison and its entirety is a bad situation.

Now, some people do deserve to be there for vicious crimes and things like that but the way the system is ran, it's really a dark place. I get even triggered by trying to-- because like when I'm speaking to you, I'm flashing back on how bad it is. It's really bad. Some people didn't leave the prison with their sanity or their lives as people got murdered that you don't know about by guards or by other inmates and things like that. It can happen in a split second, so it's not a good place.

Melissa Harris-Pery: Nicole, I guess I want to ask a question that is in some ways related to that which is for curators, for museums, for those who perhaps are in particular maybe for institutions that are in a space where they are working to centralize issues of social justice, and maybe are thinking about doing work that would include curating exhibits of art created by people who are currently incarcerated. What might be some of the advice or pieces of clarity that you would want to offer to those institutions about how to approach that kind of work?

Nicole Fleetwood: For me, at the root of institutions that want to do work around criminalization, incarceration, more broadly the carceral state, it really is for them to think about why they're doing that work. I think it starts with really doing some reckoning around why and once institutions perhaps connection to reproducing a logic that allows certain people to end up in cages and other people to be able to walk around and look at the art on white walls. There's a logic that I think is connected to museums functioning and prisons functioning.

Often when organizations want to get involved and work with incarcerated populations, they do it in ways that continue to keep groups separated. They imagine their audience as the people who are in the museum, and they imagine themselves doing service by going out to community or to work with incarcerated people. I think the best practices is actually in what BECC was doing in '71 '72 and '73 thinking about it as cultural exchange, thinking about it from a very asset-rich perspective and it doesn't mean that incarcerated people have access to the same resources as non-incarcerated people.

When one wants to collaborate to assume that we know more than the people we want to collaborate with is already a failed collaboration, and it really is about building relationships and being in it for the long haul. I want to qualify that because I think the long call is really to overturn and to abolish prisons, but I think as we're doing the work inside we should be doing it with as much integrity as we can bring to it, and also humility, constantly learning, but with a bigger vision and the bigger vision is that the system is not working.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Nicole Fleetwood is the inaugural James Weldon Johnson professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University and a 2021 MacArthur Fellow. Russell Craig is a painter based in New York City. Thank you both.

Nicole Fleetwood: Thank you so much.

Russell Craig: Thank you.

[00:14:10] [END OF AUDIO]

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