It is this soul-baring that has fostered my deep affection for and connections with incarcerated writers and artists. It is their willingness to open themselves up to a world that has closed them off that inspires the work I do and the friendships I’ve made with the men and women I’ve worked with behind prison walls.
These relationships stem primarily from my time as the newspaper editor for the grassroots organization All of Us or None. The group’s onboarding process emphasized the importance of putting people most directly impacted by mass incarceration at the forefront of every policy initiative, demonstration, and call to action. I took that directive quite literally, making sure someone who was in prison owned the very front of the newspaper every month, with a full-page image of artwork by an incarcerated artist.
Over the years, various organizations and individuals have aggregated these works, not only because of the quantity of art being produced inside the prison system but their quality as well. Arts in Corrections, California Arts in Corrections, and the Justice Arts Coalition all run programs that provide space and materials for artists to create drawings, paintings, sketches, and sculptures, often with the artists’ permission to display photographs of their completed work on the organization’s website.
When I first started working on the paper, I would peruse these resources for potential cover art. I was immediately blown away by the skillfulness and the beauty in each piece. Even the more gritty or gory drawings were breathtaking in their own right. The psychological strength these artists had to possess to produce something so beautiful amid an environment so horrific had a profound impact on me. As life has continued to have its ups and downs, I have tried to find the beauty amid all of it.
On the first day in April 2020, I sent roughly 500 copies of the paper’s first edition to individuals incarcerated in California, including the cover artist to whom I had written a note about his work and sent two extra copies. By the end of the month, I had a stack of mail postmarked by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The envelopes were filled with pages and pages of handwritten letters on yellow legal pad paper. I read each one as best I could. Most were legible, but the overwhelming majority were penned by trauma-induced shaky hands. I also received a letter from the cover artist, graciously accepting my apology for printing his work without his direct permission (I had downloaded the image from one of the aforementioned sites) and thanking me for getting his work “over the prison walls.” He had sent one of the extra copies to his mother, who was proud of a son the world had told her to disgrace. A warming experience for all three of us.
After the first wave of letters, a new one arrived, this batch packaged in much larger envelopes. They contained drawings in a variety of mediums: Some were simply doodles alongside poetry; others were more classical acrylic works from prisons where those supplies had been made available. I rarely had to pull from the web for cover art after that.
Two artists in particular stood out to me—Gerald Morgan and Scott Smith—which is why their work appears in this book. The following is an attempt to help you know them beyond the “prisoner” label on their jumpsuits and to provide some context about the images in this book. I also profile Carnell Hunnicutt, an artist who created a graphic novel version of Race to Incarcerate during his incarceration. These artists’ work embodies what French sculptor Auguste Rodin articulated as the key elements of art: “to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.”
“I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say, ‘he feels deeply, he feels tenderly.’”
—Vincent Van Gogh
Gerald Morgan
Gerald Morgan’s Doing Time painting, which precedes chapter 6, appeared on the June 2020 cover of All of Us or None’s newspaper, published a week after police officers killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. It still strikes me here, but the original is truly devastating, shaded with midnight blues, crafted with delicate brush strokes that create the various brown tones that contour the main figure.
After receiving the June paper and my note, Gerald wrote to me that the experience of seeing his art used in such a manner brought him a glimmer of light during a “dark time” in his life. At that point Gerald had been incarcerated for twenty years. He had been locked down in his cell for months due to the pandemic and denied access to the San Quentin art studio that had served as a saving grace for him throughout the years. It was lonely, and a haunting reminder of what it felt like to be new in prison again.
Gerald had been released by the time I finished Reimagining the Revolution. I was able to track him down through the Humans of San Quentin, a humanitarian nonprofit that proliferates the stories of individuals impacted by the criminal justice system. They had interviewed Gerald upon his release and passed along his information.1 I was anxious to ask him about the piece that had moved me so greatly and had brought us together.
“I’ve seen that specific face in a number of individuals including myself,” he told me when we finally connected. “Whenever we are doing time, we don’t ever know what to expect from one day to the next. As far as the possibilities of paroling, that’s always happening way outside the door. We have a deep, dark understanding of where we are and nothing is open to us except maybe a back door. The element of freedom is so far beyond.”
It was a feeling that hit Gerald hard when he first entered the prison system in 1998. For the first two years, he said, he isolated, rarely leaving his cell for fear of what he might encounter in the general population. He had begun to feel “invisible,” something he captured in Anticipation, which precedes this book’s introductory chapter. Anticipation is a retelling of the faces he saw in the prison visiting room, anxious women in a strange place waiting with both excitement and apprehension. Sometimes, Gerald said, “they don’t even see you.”
The feelings of loneliness and fear were so acute in these early years that they crept up twenty-two years later, long after he’d already integrated himself with the men he was incarcerated with and developed friendships he holds to this day.
Most of these relationships were fostered in the art studio. As a child, Gerald had loved to draw, so he gravitated toward the studio. He met other artists I’ve worked with, such as Bruce Fowler, who taught him how to mix paints, and Isaiah Daniels, who instructed him on photorealism. The men in the studio became his “perimeter,” the people he could feel comfortable around and relate to. They were his peers and teachers, and the studio was his sanctuary.
I asked him about this dichotomy—the life he lived in prison and the life he lived in the art studio—which he depicted in both the beauty and sadness of Doing Time.
“That’s the only time when it don’t feel like you’re doing time,” he said. “Beyond that front door to that art studio is prison, but when you come into that art studio and you’re creating something or learning something, you don’t think about what’s going on beyond that door. You get a chance within the studio for your mind to be free as well as your body as you create.”
Since his release in February 2023, Gerald has reunited with his family, including his sister, whose portrait introduces chapter 4. He bought a full-size easel and extra canvases and has started work on his next art project. He got a job working by Pier 39, a section of San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf that is lined with high-end art galleries, but he says his inspiration is still drawn from the men he left behind across the Bay.
“My roots are still in the prison system. They got me through all that time, and those are the people I’m connected to, the people I still reach out to when I’m tossing around ideas.”
“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.”
—Twyla Tharp
Carnell Hunnicutt Sr.
In the preface of this book, you’ll read about Carnell Hunnicutt, a graphic artist who transformed Marc Mauer’s Race to Incarcerate into a graphic novel. An “official” graphic novel was published by the New Press in 2013, but it was illustrated by established artist Sabrina Jones, supposedly, according to a presentation Marc gave, with a blessing from an incarcerated creator. The whole thing seemed shady, so I started looking for the original artist. “Carnell Hunnicutt,” as he appeared briefly in Marc’s introduction, was easy to find via a simple Google search. The top hit is a link to his aggregated work on the Real Cost of Prisons Project (www.realcostofprisons.org), a website that includes written work and comics by prisoners, a daily news blog focused on mass incarceration, and three comic books for purchase. The landing page for Carnell’s work begins with a picture of him with RCPP founder Lois Ahrens, a brief copyright statement, and a note: “Great news! Carnell is free!!!”
After some internet sleuthing, I found out that Carnell had been freed from a supermax prison in Sommers, Connecticut, in March 2023 after twenty-nine years of incarceration. He had moved back home to Texas and reconnected with his family. I pinged him on Facebook and eventually we got on the phone.
I asked him about what went down with Marc, and if he’d conceded to having another artist run with his idea. Although Carnell was wounded by the interaction (as you’ll read in the preface), he said that he faced many challenges as an incarcerated artist, namely access to supplies and retaliation from correctional officers.
“I wanted to tell my story through art because I was witnessing things as a prisoner that show how corrupt the Department of Corrections and the whole system is,” Carnell said. “I wanted to tell the story of what I was enduring and what I was witnessing during that time.”
The Connecticut prison department put Carnell in and out of solitary confinement for a total of thirteen years. In isolation, Carnell started reading about politics, socialism, and capitalism. He read about Black liberation movement leaders like Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey. He read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Mauer’s Race to Incarcerate, creating comic book versions of each, once he could access pen, paper, and a decent source of light again. The first page of his version of Race to Incarcerate precedes chapter 2.
Every time Carnell would emerge from solitary, his drawings would become a little more political, a little more pointed at the injustices of the system that confined him. He took on issues like overcrowding, police violence, and guards’ attacks on prisoners. He drew two non-comic images with colored pencils of a segregation cell and the prison’s “recreation cage,” a space boxed in by a fourteen-foot concrete wall and a steel cage roof—prisoners’ only access to fresh air and sunlight.
Each illustration brought increasingly harsher consequences, which Carnell says he has nightmares about to this day. Once guards put him in four-point bed restraints and beat him. They put him on “pen restriction,” not only removing his sole artistic tool but the instrument with which he could file an appeal against such action. When he was able to smuggle in ink cartridges, guards tried to break his hands.
These attempts had the opposite effect from their intent: Rather than break Carnell into submission, they fueled his artistic desire.
“A lot of my best work comes from the supermax. You’re down 24/7; you have no contact with anyone; you’re chained up when you come out, strip-searched when you leave, and antagonized by the guards. And you can’t put your hands on them, so you need an outlet. My outlet was my art.
“I could use it to tell them off, make them laugh, or tell a story. I directed my anger into my artwork to keep me at peace.”
Since his release, Carnell says, he hasn’t had much time for drawing. He’s reestablishing relationships with his children and family, working on getting his commercial driver’s license, and adapting to a society that has changed dramatically in the thirty years since he last saw it. He does have plans, however, to aggregate his work, much of which he sent to his brother-in-law for safekeeping, and publish an anthology of the art that kept him at peace during his darkest hours.
“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
—Aristotle
Scott Smith
