Breaking Down Walls: Art as a Portal for the Incarcerated

A portal can be a gate to connect spaces, a passage to a state of mind, or a door to a different time. For the artists Emanuel Martinez (b. 1947) and Lily Yeh (b. 1941), creating art with incarcerated communities is an opportunity to build portals through prison walls. Breaking Down Walls: Art as a Portal for the Incarcerated highlights the efforts of artists to create transformative experiences in carceral facilities.

Breaking Down Walls features letters, photographs, exhibition flyers, scrapbooks, and other primary source documents from the collections of Emanuel Martinez and Lily Yeh. The exhibition focuses on two prison art projects: The Emanuel Project and the Graterford Prison Project. From 1998 to 2001, Yeh worked with inmates serving life sentences at State Correctional Institution – Graterford in Pennsylvania. Since 2009, Martinez has collaborated with incarcerated youth around the nation to create murals in their facilities. The documents displayed here have been selected to offer insight into the experiences of making art directly from those who organized and participated in these projects. Martinez and Yeh endeavored to use art as a tool of healing for inmates and their communities.

This exhibition is co-curated by Christina Ayson-Plank and Ricky Gomez of the Archives of American Art. The Archives of American Art is dedicated to collecting, preserving, and making available to all the primary sources documenting the visual arts of the United States.

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