Cheryl Chen’s “Prison Cell Sketch” can be seen at The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit.
“The judge is saying ‘life’ like it ain’t someone’s life,” rapped Gene “Malice” Thornton on the 2006 Clipse classic “Hello New World.” It was indifference to the psychological consequences of imprisonment he was decrying — that and the American tendency to look for carceral solutions to social and political problems.
Nearly two decades later, not much has changed. We still lock up way more people per capita than any other rich nation, and we still tend to forget about them once they have been caged.
Not Kristen Evangelista and Tamar Montuma. These curators are determined to raise consciousness about the lives and experiences of prisoners, the harshness of protracted confinement, and the unequal application of justice by the system sworn to carry it out. The vehicle for this campaign is a quartet of prison-themed exhibitions at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit that are unabashedly political in intention and execution.
Other curators are coy about the messages of the shows they hang. Evangelista and Montuma want to persuade gallery-goers to become advocates for the incarcerated.
“Something to Hold On To: Art in the Carceral System,” the biggest and most eloquent of the shows, collects work from seven painters, photographers and draftspeople all too familiar with the cold inside of a cellblock. It is unremittingly sad. Artists tend to be freedom-loving people, and much of the art we see in galleries and museums is an implicit celebration of open skies and wide landscapes. In “Something to Hold On To,” limits to the artists’ latitude of action are apparent in every frame. Most of these creative spirits have pushed past restlessness and boredom to something more fundamental and suffocating: a pervasive gloom that stretches past the depictions of their own experiences to intermingle with the darker currents of American history.
Todd Tarselli’s “Solitary.”
This pain is visible on the face of the bald-headed convict, squashed in a tight rectangle and painted in mud-brown instant coffee on a paper bag in Todd Tarselli’s brutal “Solitary.” He peers through a steel-bolted slat in a featureless wall and grasps at the light, but there is nothing visible on the other side, and no sign that any relief from his torment is coming. Antionette Stephen, an inmate at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Hunterdon County, gives us color without levity in “The Judged Woman — Untethered,” a mixed-media collage of a downcast woman whose body has been shattered into jagged pieces.
Though much of this show is blunt and forceful as a vault door slammed shut, some of the most powerful (and most pessimistic) pieces are the understated ones, like Davi Russo’s series of tender Polaroids of too-brief family reunions during visiting hours. Then there is Cheryl Chen’s grim sketch of a cell, complete with steel bars and a yawning latrine, with pin-stokes of controlled savagery like day-counting tallies on a bare concrete wall.
Chen’s “Prison Cell Sketch” and “Untitled” image of a locked room carry with them the frightening alterity of prison experience. These are dispatches from a place far beyond the world that free people know. Their brutal effectiveness is also the show’s biggest danger. Prison tales invite voyeurism from the many who have never been jailed but who are fascinated by the details of life behind bars. The spread of cameras and social media to all corners of the Earth except the halls of correctional facilities has intensified the curiosity of those drawn to a horror show.
Thus Evangelista and Montuma have made sure that any rubberneckers leave the gallery with a hefty dose of political and topical content. They have given yards of wall space to Gilberto Rivera’s “Jail Bird” series of collages: images of parrots, swans and other creatures of the air contending with the institutional furniture in prison cells. The walls behind the birds are decorated with hundreds of glued-together strips of headlines and lead paragraphs from newspaper articles, many decrying conditions on the inside. To encounter Rivera’s work is to read; given the limited reach and narrow scope of the news industry, it may represent the most concentrated dose of prison reporting you will see all year.
Jared Owens’ “Ellapsium (Diptych).”
The show’s most poetic pieces are no less polemical. Jared Owens mixes his paint with dirt from the yard at the Federal prison at Fairton in Cumberland County and affixes images of faceless bodies in huddled groups to large canvases with linoleum stamps. “Ellapsium (Diptych)” is heavy with a feeling of an interminable wait. His juxtaposition of crowded corridors and wide-open fields of yellow feels like a protest against the irrationality and inhumanity of borders of all kinds. The curved shapes at the bottom of the piece are an unmistakable allusion to the ships of Middle Passage: livestock in a storage unit, souls crammed in a hole and set adrift to points unknown.
If Owens’ moody work murmurs of the parallels between slavery and the modern prison industry, the aggressive acrylics of Chris Wilson make the connection explicit. One large painting, as crude as solitary confinement itself, takes aim at pig-faced executives profiting from the imprisonment of others. In thick black and white letters, Wilson challenges us to care. Another piece isn’t quite so talkative, but crackles with danger nevertheless: a long, narrow, lurid panel of 10 prisoner-firefighters, many gas-masked like trench warriors, persevering in a world that has turned to flame around them. Together they turn a hose on an unquenchable blaze. One cradles a rescued child dressed in the colors of the American flag. Another takes his mask down and, red-faced and roaring, turns to the audience in a spasm of rage.
Wilson names profiteers that may not be familiar to those outside the prison system: Platinum Equity, Aventiv Technology, Securus. “Who says slavery is dead?,” his paintings ask. In an adjacent room, another artist takes the fight — and the fury — even farther. “When Justice Is Not Served” shows the photocopied collages of Ojore Lutalo, a New Jersey-born anarchist who spent 22 years in solitary confinement in Trenton State Prison. Lutalo’s intense, combative dispatches from captivity look a little like revolutionary broadsheets, a little like the anonymous cut-out notes sent by kidnappers, a little like mimeographed punk rock fanzines, and more than a bit like old-school diner placemats.
Ojore Lutalo’s “Untitled (Every Picture Tells a Story).”
The “Justice” pieces span 30 years of activity but barely change in that time: They consist of newspaper articles, grainy photographs of life behind bars, slogans, cartoon speech bubbles, and rough-hewn memorials to those killed or incarcerated by the authorities. His vigorous, sweeping condemnation of the entire American political system may have distinguished him in the 1990s; in 2025, it’s just another day on social media. After decades of runaway mass incarceration, the paranoia, resentment and corrosion of the system have escaped maximum security and seized us all.
The human cost of imprisonment is spotlit in a pair of peripheral shows. “Perceptions Reimagined: Art from the Women at Edna Mahan,” a small but emotional exhibition, features drawings made by prisoners under the guidance of the excellent New Jersey artist and professor Cara London. “Reentry, Reestablished, Renewed” consists of photos of 10 men and women released from Middlesex County Jail. Photographer Erik James Montgomery designed these shots with the freed prisoners. Some of the images are overly sentimental. But when the show hits, it makes reverberations powerful enough to rattle all the bars on the cellblock.
“Out of the Darkness” finds a man named Cliff, locked up for 36 years, appraising a life-sized photograph of himself as a free 22-year-old. The kid he was is reckless and ready but with a core of sweetness; modern Cliff is wizened, exhausted and resolute. His expression is an amalgam of pride, pity and disbelief, and he keeps his eyes on the photo even as his hand searches for the door.
Prison reform is not a priority for our current elected leaders. Neither is compassion. Our appetite for self-examination has not been voracious lately. By asking for sympathy for those who feel victimized by the carceral system, The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey is leaning into a cold wind. Good for them. These four exhibitions aren’t the prettiest shows around. They certainly aren’t comforting. But they are honest about the twin legacies of racism and inequality, the cruelty of solitary confinement, and the ostracism that returning prisoners face.
The VAC showed guts putting these exhibitions on. And if we are ever going to get serious about tackling this problem, guts are what we are going to need.
“Something to Hold On To: Art and the Carceral System,” “Ojore Lutalo: When Justice is Not Served,” “Reentry, Reestablished, Renewed” and “Perceptions Reimagined: Art from the Women at Edna Mahan” can be seen at The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey through Jan. 26. Visit artcenternj.org.
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