"Wish You Were Here": Greeting Cards As a Mediator of Relational Violences in Prison

Background and Purpose: In this paper, I speak to the ways in which artmaking practices in prisons mediate what I call the relational violences of confinement. Prisons, I will show, disrupt the capacity of the incarcerated person to relate and to be related to. “To relate,” within the context of this paper, refers to the incarcerated person’s capacity to understand themselves and their relationships with others—particularly with those in the free world—beyond the relational logics imposed by the prison. “To be related to” speaks to the ways in which prisons structure how people in the free world think about and interact with people in prison. I argue that art countermands and opens new ways of relating that resist the organizing capacities of the prison.

Methods: This paper is based on six years of ethnographic field research in Michigan prisons. The author writes through his experiences as a curator for the Annual Exhibition of Artists in Michigan Prisons as well as a theatre and creative writing workshop facilitator with the Prison Creative Arts Project. This ethnography is complemented by interviews with approximately twenty artists in prison completed via correspondence as well as recipients of greeting cards by incarcerated people in the free world.

Results: Using visual art objects produced in prisons—specifically the greeting card—people in prison mobilize themselves beyond the status of “inmate.” Visual artmaking practices are experienced as practices of escape, self-fashioning, and kinship. As a tool of self-fashioning, art becomes a means by which people in prison fashion themselves from people to whom violence is done—inmates, prisoners—to people that work to countermand these violences—as artists and survivors of confinement.

Conclusions and Implications: Art objects created in prisons, particularly the greeting card, challenge and resist the relational violences facilitated by prisons. These creative acts open up new relational possibilities—both within the prison and with the outside world—that resist the prison’s efforts to sever or control connection. Art becomes a way to imagine and enact modes of being that are rooted in care, agency, and survival. This paper suggests that art in prisons should be understood not only as a form of personal expression or rehabilitation but as a vital political practice that opens up new ways of understanding how relational violences are enacted, negotiated, resisted, and experienced by people and artists in prison.