'Taste of Justice Fair' To Exhibit Prison Art

Saturday, 05 August 2006 11:46

Washington, DC - The Taste of Justice fair will be held in Washington, DC on Saturday, September 30, 2006.  Please revisit this site periodically for details about the fair and the prominent organizations sponsoring it.

The fair will be held at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, 901 G Street NW, Washington, D.C.

Justice organizations and related nonprofit organizations from across America are invited to have exhibits there.

A major attraction of the fair will be prison arts and crafts from the extensive collection of the Prisons Foundation.  There will also a stage where ex-inmate performing artists and others will entertain.

The Prisons Foundation Art Collection

The Prisons Foundation art collection will be a central part of the Taste of Justice fair.  It consists of nearly a thousand pieces of art created in prisons all across the country, a collection that has drawn the attention of curators at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, DC and the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.  The former examined pieces of Prisons Foundation pano or handkerchief art and the latter looked at drawings and paintings that depicted cell interiors occupied by the artists.

Because all art is accepted from interested inmates, the collection is unusually broad and does not suffer from confinement to current conceptions about what constitutes "art," "good art," "prison art," or from other forms of characterization bias.  It contains pieces of both anthropological and aesthetic interest and provides unprecedented insight into the lives, working conditions, ambitions and visions of inmate artists.  The collection includes work from those traditionally trained or professionally active before incarceration, but the vast majority of pieces are from self-taught artists who began drawing or painting behind bars.  Some of the work falls into the current "Outsider Art" category.  Other pieces could redefine it.

Large experimental canvases; lush erotica; detailed landscapes; fantasy, tattoo, and graffiti- based art will be shown along with cartoons, ethnic-heritage art from African American and Hispanic artists, drawings of celebrities, prison-theme works, abstracts, animal images, self portraits, and art stemming from original spiritual visions or traditional religious iconography.  One artist creates reproductions of Old Masters and Impressionist pieces in pastels.  Another paints on cardboard using coffee creamer, mustard, spinach juice and floor wax.

The Prisons Foundation Arts and Crafts Shows -- 17 were held in 2005, exhibiting work from 302 prison artists -- have attracted considerable media attention over the two years of their existence, including five articles published in The Washington Post alone, and Prisons Foundation founder and director Dennis Sobin has been interviewed on Maryland Public Television's ArtWorks.

The event is free and open to the public. Organizations will have tables to educate the public, distribute literature and recruit new members.  Free food and beverages will be provided, compliments of area food markets and eateries.

We look forward to seeing you at Taste of Justice!

Visit Prisons Foundation at : http://www.PrisonsFoundation.org