Two days with the Arts in Corrections community

Land Together’s Executive Director and our Mule Creek Program Manager spent two days at the Statewide Arts in Corrections (AIC) Convening, hosted by the California Arts Council and the Prison Arts Collective at The California Endowment. 

Creative expression runs through everything we do at Land Together. Our prison program participants design and build the gardens themselves, shaping bare ground into living works of art.

They cover the walls and benches around them with vibrant murals and mosaics. They grow foods and plants that connect them to home and heritage, weave baskets and make dyes from what they harvest, write poems and songs together, and open and close each class by reading a verse or lyric aloud. In one exercise, participants write down a pattern they're ready to leave behind and compost the paper, watching it turn into soil that feeds new growth. For many people, making art is how they work through grief and come back to themselves.

At the AIC convening, our Mule Creek Program Manager led a meditation for the full room, then ran a flower pounding workshop with our Executive Director using plants and fruit harvested from the gardens at CHCF and Mule Creek. Hammering petals into fabric is an art form and a release at the same time. There was a lot of joy and a lot of mess.

Mark Taylor described a creative writing course he built where participants write from the perspective of the people they harmed, then write an amends letter back. He said everyone needs to step through and face their pain or it follows them for life.

Peter Mertz talked about his photographs from prison arts programs. What his camera catches is people letting their guard down, which only happens once there's trust. And trust gets built slowly.

Our Mule Creek program is funded by Arts in Corrections through the California Arts Council. The convening also launched a statewide training and community-building effort for AIC providers, and we're glad to be part of it.