Struggling with Art: How Artmaking Practices Mediate the Relational Violences of Prisons

Abstract

In this dissertation, I show the ways in which visual art, theatre, and creative writing practices countermand what I call the relational violences of prisons, the incapacitation of one’s ability to relate or to be related to. Utilizing data collected through ethnographic fieldwork in Michigan prisons, I point to the ways in which artmaking practices provide points of connection between people in the freeworld and people that live in prison, subversive experiences of joy and communitas, and a means by which people in prison may relate to the violences of confinement in new and imaginative ways. At the same time, this project seeks to complicate an overly simplistic understanding of artmaking practices as a guarantor of well-being in prisons. To do so, I point to ethical dilemmas experienced by exhibition curators and workshop facilitators that risk reproducing the very relational violences that they seek to subvert through their artistic praxes. By foregrounding the prison as an object of study, I examine the ways in which art itself becomes subject to carceral power as a technology of relational violence.