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Fraught Imaginaries: The Messy and Necessary Work of Giving Voice to Incarcerated Youth

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June 3, 2022 by Michelle Fountain and Leslie Schallock

Leslie Schallock, English Teacher at Secure Juvenile Detention Center, VA:

In the spring of 2020 I saw a blurb for a new book release, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, by Nicole Fleetwood. I bought it, read it, and let it simmer until last summer when I was inspired to do a project with BLTN. Guided by this text, I sought to forge an exchange between the incarcerated youth I teach and youth in non-incarcerated communities. 

The facility where I work is a 58-bed facility, which houses youth aged 11-20 who are being detained, serving sentences, or awaiting support services. While the population fluctuates, the demographics are majority male (90-95%) and include majority white, Black, and Hispanic racial identities. Residents can come from all over the state (and sometimes other states).

Since mass incarceration strips young people of their voice and connection to those in the outside world, I sought to create a collaboration, learning from the prison art programs that Nicole Fleetwood studies in her book. Her research examines how these collaborations often undermine prisoners’ voices and mainly serve art professionals’ career interests and provide funding to prisons, reinforcing injustice rather than encouraging change. “Fraught imaginaries” is the concept developed by Fleetwood to name the “necessary, messy work of creating art, political action, and new sets of relationships between the incarcerated and nonincarcerated, and doing so across forms of penal space, time, and matter” (158). To emphasize her words, this work is messy but absolutely necessary.

“Fraught imaginaries” is the concept developed by Fleetwood to name the “necessary, messy work of creating art, political action, and new sets of relationships between the incarcerated and nonincarcerated, and doing so across forms of penal space, time, and matter” (158). To emphasize her words, this work is messy but absolutely necessary.

The premise for the project was to set up a website for my students to submit their personal artwork on a voluntary basis, and non-incarcerated students would view their digital gallery and respond to their art. Responses could range from letters back to the artist, interpretations of the art’s meaning, or ekphrastic writing through a poem or story. I wanted the exchange to challenge how the non-incarcerated see the incarcerated by counteracting stereotypes in order to humanize and resist the erasure of those marginalized by society. The responsibility gets shifted back to mainstream society to interpret how members can liberate the artist–figuratively, through analyzing the piece’s meaning, but also literally, through raising consciousness against mass incarceration.

Michelle Fountain of Woodstock Union High School in Vermont reached out, excited about the applications to her ongoing antiracist work in her classroom, and we drew up plans at the end of summer.  In August 2021, I created the website for the digital art gallery and titled it Fraught Imaginaries.

https://lschallo.wixsite.com/fraughtimaginaries

At this point, the project has been stable, by successful bursts. Our website currently hosts eight pieces, with the collection growing by a piece per month. Given that our student enrollment is down due to COVID-19 and that this is a voluntary project, this rate is still encouraging. My students and I have been very impressed with the engagement from Michelle Fountain’s students. They have enjoyed the attention and insightful feedback from concerned peers. For those who submit their art, they are always smiling and eager to see what Michelle’s students have to say. They enjoy seeing that others had the task of working to understand them, rather than having to de-center themselves for the sake of others’ comfort.

To reflect on the “fraught’ elements of this project, I’ll say that the gallery really sheds light on my students’ institutional realities. To start, art is the only medium we can use due to confidentiality protections, and many students do not see themselves as artists. For those that do play with art, they still require a lot of support to bring down their barriers to sharing their artwork. Many are reluctant or not interested in providing outsiders with an insight into their experience. This is understandable given how vulnerable this population is. Many students do not have positive associations with sharing their experiences, and as a result the gallery has been slow to get submissions. 

The project is still valuable, nonetheless, to those who don’t submit their art because they can still see the exchanges happening in class as we all view the art and responses. Their commentary in class tells me that they are processing what is being exchanged and are seeing how it’s affecting Michelle’s classes. Those who do participate enjoy a sense of pride in having their work enjoyed by others and feel connected to those who understand their art’s message.

Michelle Fountain, English Teacher at Woodstock High School, Woodstock, VT

I have been teaching my students to analyze Leslie’s students’ art using the AP Language technique of OPTIC: Overview, Parts, Title, Interconnections, Conclusion. The process helps my students to slow down and really focus on the art, which we do as a class before they break into groups to write brief responses and questions, allowing the students to respond to the artists with their impressions, interpretations, questions, and comments. 

My students are 9th Grade English I students who come from 10-12 different rural towns in and surrounding Woodstock, Vermont. They primarily identify as white and many have lived in this rural environment for their entire lives. 

To foreground this project, I shared excerpts with my students from Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam, which is a novel in verse about a wrongly incarcerated Black teenager who expresses himself through his art and poetry. My students were able to make good connections and have enjoyed the opportunity to try to interpret the art coming from Leslie’s students. 

So far we have done four separate responses to two pieces of art each session. Leslie lets me know when she has posted new art and then I schedule a time for my 80 students to respond (in small groups half of whom focus on one piece of art and half the other). My student groups collaboratively form their responses and submit them directly on the website. At times, Leslie is able to share some answers to the questions from my students.

This project has been a great opportunity to get my students to consider the challenges incarcerated youth face and to consider the school to prison pipeline. They make connections to these incarcerated students as people through their art. One student noted, “In my day-to-day life, I never think of incarcerated youth” noting that it was good to have this experience. Another noted, “I have this bubble around me. It is good to learn of others’ struggles.” 

Students appreciate the art pieces, admiring the talent and creativity of the artists. “It is cool to see their experiences turned into art and for them to use art to stay positive,” a student commented noting she hoped they enjoyed having outside feedback.

Some unexpected challenges for my students are the limited nature of this conversation and thus the inability to make this a more complete exchange. They view the work and make comments but do not get a lot of information back. They wonder if they were interpreting the art correctly or if they were way off base. They wonder why the juvenile detention system will not let them communicate with them further. One student commented “The intentions of this project are good but the restrictions in communication are a detriment.” This student, and several others, questioned the system of incarceration that confines voices as well as bodies. 

After learning the definition of the word fraught, one of my students questioned why this exchange was called “Fraught Imaginaries”. Rather than just giving them Fleetwood’s definition, we discussed what is “fraught” about the incarcerated students’  situations. We discussed the idea that people make mistakes but should not be defined by them and that it does not seem fair that their voices are taken away as part of the punishment. We considered that life is harder for some than others, depending upon their background and economic status. We concluded that there is much about our system of incarceration that is fraught. 

“Fraught Imaginaries” has expanded the thinking of Woodstock students and given at least some form of voice to the incarcerated artists. 

We concluded that there is much about our system of incarceration that is fraught. 

Recently, Leslie shared some feedback from a couple of the artists in response to some of the specific comments and questions from my students. The students really enjoyed this and got a kick out of the fact that they were often overanalyzing pieces, reading too much into them. In responding to the Power of Fall, some students saw the gray parts representing the juvenile detention center and the colorful parts representing the outside world with the fish’s eye being the artist looking out. However, the artist noted that he was inspired by Zodiac signs and the season. 

A Sample

Piece: Power of Fall

“Power of Fall” by a student in Virginia

VT Perspective: 

Laura, Sam, Sequoia:

This is a beautiful piece. We think the leaf represents the change you want to happen throughout your life and how you want to turn to a new leaf when you get out of juvie. The fish represents how you keep going even when times are rough like salmon making the trip upstream every year. We think the colors are very nice and we like them a lot.

VA Perspective: 

I [Leslie] pulled the artist aside one day to review the comments he received on his piece, Power of Fall. Some comments stood out to him as very analytical, nothing that he consciously intended with the work. “Nah, I wasn’t thinkin’ all that.” Others ask questions that he was not even sure he had the answers to. Many comments, though, overlapped on the image of salmon swimming upstream. This one particular comment made him think about himself and the fish, or himself as the fish:

“It’s like those fish that swim [up]stream and jump in the air to get to the other side, but then there’s a bear waiting to catch it. Some get lucky…some don’t.” 

He says this last part with realization. He starts to laugh. In his mind he is the fish that gets caught. There is no animosity in this statement, just an observation of mother nature’s food chains. We both pause and feel the messiness that comes with imagining a way out–for both the fish and himself. He shrugs his shoulders, with either resignation or acceptance, and scrolls through the rest of the comments. Thanks to “Fraught Imaginaries,” that responsibility does not rest on his shoulders alone.

Michelle Fountain is a 2021-22 BLTN Fellow.
Leslie Schallock is a 2021-22 Audacity Fellow.


2 comments »

  1. Colin Baumgartner says:

    Thanks for sharing this! I’m very moved by this collaboration. My students are about to finish up Just Mercy and I have been really delighted to hear how critically and deeply my students are probing the criminal justice system, inequalities in society, &c.

    We’ve really been focusing on Stevenson’s idea that we can only understand something through proximity. Sounds so simple on the surface, but what a profound lesson about life (and what a delight that my English 9 kiddos are so in tune with this challenge). I am seeing so much of this in the lovely exchange you detail here.

  2. Sara Taggart says:

    Michelle and Leslie, thank you for sharing your experience.
    Michelle’s goal to “[counteract] stereotypes in order to humanize and resist the erasure of those marginalized by society” is so important. Despite education reform efforts promoting restorative justice and other practices, the school-to-prison pipeline is as real and threatening as ever, and those caught it in risk losing so much. It is the responsibility of all of us to do our part not to let these youth (nor any incarcerated persons) be, as you write, “erased.” It seems clear from Leslie’s commentary that her students have a new understanding of this, especially when she wrote, “This student, and several others, questioned the system of incarceration that confines voices as well as bodies.” Thank you for the opportunity you provided to your students and for sharing this with our community.

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