Glance at Culture - Ella Nowicki on Incarceration, Art and Defining Justice in Terms of Accountability

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Please visit the following links to learn more:
Shahn’s sketches for Rikers Island;
Correctional History discussion of Shahn;
Lucienne Bloch, Cycle of a Woman’s Life: Childhood:
Shahn’s photo of an incarcerated painter at Blackwell’s Island;
Larry Cook, The Visiting Room and Urban Landscapes;
Groundswell murals at Rikers;
Handwritten survey responses in the Shahn Papers at the Archives of American Art.

SHOW NOTES:
2:00 Ben Shahn’s and Lou Block’s proposed Rikers Island Penitentiary murals for the New Deal 

4:45 West wall’s mural representing prison reform

6:05 East wall’s mural of prisons in need of reform

8:20 New York’s Municipal Art Commission rejects murals as psychologically unfit for prisoners and as anti-social propaganda 

9:00 1935 survey of Blackwell Island prisoners about murals

11:35 one incarcerated man likened Shahn’s murals to Diego Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural

12:40 concerns about making incarcerated life a spectacle

14:10 responses by Ben Shahn and Lou Block to survey

17:20 utility of survey for art historians

19:10 survey archive

21:30 Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene by Diana Linden

22:10 Ben Shahn’s New York by Harvard Art Musuems

22:50 Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by artists and administrators of the WPA Project by Francis O’Connor includes material from Lucienne Bloch

23:10 Bloch’s “Cycle of a Woman’s Life” accepted for WPA Project in 1935

23:50 Bloch’s primary sources quote from letters by incarcerated females 

29:30 Harold Lehman’s Man’s Daily Bread erected at Rikers and later removed

35:20 Faith Ringgold’s 1971 For the Women’s House

37:00 Reception to Ringgold’s For the Women’s House by male incarcerated population 

38:45 2012 Prison Landscapes by Alyse Emdur

42:10 Antoine Ealy’s opinion of prison landscapes

43:20 utility of murals in correctional institutions

44:15 Nicole Fleetwood’s book and exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

45:00 Shahn’s photograph of incarcerated man painting portrait at Blackwell’s Island 

47:30 Utility of art as a direct and didactic tool 

51:00 how a focus on art in correction facilities aids in facilitating justice 

56:00 Marking Time includes incarcerated and non-incarcerated artists

56:20 Artist Larry Cook

 57:30 Groundswell NYC

58:20 How Nowocki defines justice 

59:20 Mariame Kaba’s view of justice in terms of accountability as compared with punishment

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Music by Toulme.

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© Stephanie Drawdy [2025]