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[This episode was originally published on December 18, 2024]
Dancers natalya shoaf and Megan Lowe dance with small wooden beds in the dance performance If I Give You My Sorrows. Courtesy of Flyaway Productions. Photo credit: Brooke Anderson.
On today’s show, we look at how art can highlight the struggles of incarcerated women, build solidarity with them across prison walls, and fight against the erasure and censorship inherent to incarceration.
First, we’ll hear about a dance performance called If I Give You My Sorrows that’s built around the complex ways that incarcerated women relate to their beds. Then, we’ll learn about an art exhibition, The Only Door I Can Open, that’s curated and created by incarcerated artists, writers and poets inside Central California Women’s Facility.
Featuring Music The music in this episode was excerpted from compositions for If You Give Me Your Sorrows. “Skewed” “Where Betty Can Go Find Betty” “Closure” “Prayer” “Salve”
Making Contact Team Special thanks to Christine Lashaw from Empowerment Avenue for recording interviews with Tomiekia and Chantell that were part of this show.
More Information:
Producer’s Note: We learned after conducting the interviews for this story in October 2023 that Tomiekia Johnson is a plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking to overturn a California law allowing incarcerated transgender, non-binary and intersex people to be housed in prisons matching their gender identity. We want to make clear that Making Contact does not support this lawsuit, and we acknowledge that holding an abolitionist perspective means fighting to abolish the prison-industrial complex for all, even for people whose viewpoints we may deeply oppose on other issues.
TRANSCRIPT
Lucy Kang: You’re listening to Making Contact. I’m Lucy Kang.
In a dark warehouse space, dancers dressed in blue tank tops and shorts cradle small wooden beds. They move the beds around their bodies, pressing their faces into them at one point. The movements seem both intimate and melancholy.
It’s October 2023. And I’m watching a dance performance in San Francisco called If I Give You My Sorrows from Flyaway Productions. And the bed will show up again and again, in different positions and sizes. For an hour, performers will dance with and around beds: small ones and large ones and one that swings through the air as they twist and glide around it.
But these are not just any beds. These beds are meant to evoke prison beds.
Jo Kreiter: So the piece used the beds as a physical and more of a metaphoric frame to look at the experience of women who are currently incarcerated.
Lucy Kang: This is Jo Kreiter, artistic director of Flyaway Productions and the creative director of If I Give You My Sorrows.
Jo Kreiter: I’ve been working with artists and people who are incarcerated since 2017. So with this piece, we asked the women, “How is your bed an antidote to your prison experience?”
Lucy Kang: Jo knows what it’s like to have had an incarcerated loved one. She’s created an entire series of work around the experiences of incarcerated people, including three site-specific productions in The Decarceration Trilogy. And for this show, she interviewed currently and formerly incarcerated women, sometimes for hours.
Jo Kreiter: And I asked them, “Tell me about a bed. Tell me about your prison bed. What is a secret that only your bed knows about you? Tell me about your childhood bed. Tell me about your ideal bed.” And from those questions emerged a picture of both the struggle of being in prison and the ways that women, or the women we spoke to, at least, adapt.
Lucy Kang: Those words were then incorporated into some of the music composed for the performance. Like this piece, that includes the voice of formerly incarcerated trans activist Lisa Strawn.
[Music excerpt]
Lucy Kang: The bed is portrayed as a kind of repository for deeply private feelings and thoughts. To me, it feels like this idea of the bed challenges the ways that the prison industrial complex dehumanizes the people inside, where incarcerated human beings are often euphemistically referred to in budgets as “beds.”
Art, though, can show the human beings inhabiting those beds. Whether through dance, visual art or the written word, it has the power to reveal what’s hidden. It can peel back the layers of censorship that are inherent to incarceration.
One of the people Jo Kreiter interviewed for the dance performance was Betty McKay, also known as Ms. Betty. Ms. Betty was formerly incarcerated, and she started off as an advocate inside prison.
Betty McKay: I was incarcerated for 27 years, and that is a lot, particularly for women because we are at the bottom of the totem pole for everything. I became a voice inside because we didn’t have voices, and it’s hard to get people to stand up to the system when you’re inside because of retaliation. If you try to address an issue or you try to bring light to something, you could end up like, in another prison, way away from your children, your loved ones, everything.
Lucy Kang: Jo approached Ms. Betty about contributing to the dance piece.
Betty McKay: She was just like, Betty, I want you to tell your story, and we’re going to do it into dance. And I was like, “What, my story?” And she was like, “Yes, you, you have a story.” And so I just, I was, I showed up at the studio. They put me in a booth. They asked me a million questions. I answered as authentically as I could. I got emotional at times, just the memories of some of the things that I went through touched me. I didn’t know that I still had triggers to things from my incarceration, but I did. And a lot of that came through in the dance. And you heard me saying the words. When I heard them, I got emotional at the performance.
[Music excerpt]
Lucy Kang: Wow. I mean, I just remember when I was watching the performance, just being so struck by your words in particular. And I went back through and listened to it again before this interview and just, you know, the words and the music and I think the emotion, you know, really, really comes through in that section. And there’s a line where you say something like, “My bed now, when I came home, is an antidote to a lot of things.” And I’m just wondering, could you describe what you meant by that?
Betty McKay: Oh, I don’t know why I’m just like almost crying right here right now thinking of that because what I know to be true is that the bed I – and and it was like so – it was like, I never really thought about my bed. But my bed was like the only place that I could be, like, totally authentic with myself.
Like, I could cry in my bed, because even though I was someone in the prison that everyone looked for to solve problems and to make things happen and to do different things, it was Every day wasn’t a good day for me, but I couldn’t be like that outside of that bed. That bed is the only place that I could be alone with myself and my thoughts.
[Music excerpt]
I would just like to encourage people to take the time to reimagine who and what incarcerated people are and what they can do and what they’re capable of and the possibilities. Because what I know to be true is that what I did to be in prison isn’t who I am. It’s what I did. Everyone has a story, and you don’t know me unless you know my story, so you can’t judge me unless you know my story.
Lucy Kang: This project made me reconsider what my bed means to me, which I hadn’t thought of much before. It made me think of how the bed, as an object, this piece of furniture I use everyday, that’s made specifically for my rest, holds so much intimacy and care. But that also makes the absence of the system of care in prisons and other carceral facilities so stark in comparison.
Betty McKay: It was hard in there. And some days were harder than others. And some days that bed was comforting. And so it’s like everything that I went through. Everything that I was feeling in my heart and my soul could only be shared with my bed.
When I came home, once I got a job and, and had a little bit of money and was able to get a little bit of credit, the bed was the first thing I bought. That was the first thing I bought for myself after 27 years of incarceration, was the bed. And right now, today, that bed still means the same thing to me.
Salima Hamirani: I’m just jumping in to remind you that you’re listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s show and want more information, or if you’d like to leave us a comment, visit us at our new website, focmedia.org. There you can access today’s show and all of our prior episodes. And now, back to the show.
Lucy Kang: Welcome back to Making Contact. I’m Lucy Kang. Earlier on today’s show, we heard about a dance performance highlighting the experience of women who are incarcerated and the complex ways they relate to their beds.
In the next half of the show, we’re going to look more closely at a related art exhibition and what it tells us about how people outside prison walls – including those who are formerly incarcerated – can support and uplift the voices of women inside.
The question that Jo Kreiter built the dance performance around was, “How is your bed an antidote?” And that question was also used as a prompt for a visual art and poetry exhibition called The Only Door I Can Open, featuring work from artists and writers inside Central California Women’s Facility, or CCWF, in Chowchilla. The exhibition, like the dance piece, was a collaboration between Empowerment Avenue, the Museum of the African Diaspora, and Flyaway Productions.
Two women currently inside that prison curated and contributed to The Only Door I Can Open. You’ll hear their voices in the rest of the episode. They were recorded on calls made from inside prison, and as you’ll be able to tell, the prison phones don’t have the best quality. And you’ll also hear how that quality changes depending on which recording we used.
Here’s one of the exhibition’s curators, writer and poet Tomiekia Johnson.
Tomiekia Johnson: You know, we all have to process a really abstract question that some of us probably never considered, and that was, you know, what is our bed? // A woman’s bed here is much more than where she puts pajamas on, goes to sleep, wakes up. You know, it’s so much more than that.
Lucy Kang: Artist and writer Chantell-Jeannette Black is the other curator. She’s been a painter since before she was incarcerated.
Chantell-Jeannette Black: So for a lot of us, our bed was that sanctuary, which is expressed either in poetry or through visual art. And so we kind of, like, got to expose that depression through how we are under constant surveillance. We’re always exposed in our most vulnerable moments.
Lucy Kang: When it first launched, The Only Door I Can Open was shown in a gallery space near the dance performance venue in San Francisco. Paintings, drawings, and works with poetry hung on the walls. What stood out to me was just how differently the artists responded to the question about their beds.
One of the pieces on display was a poem Tomiekia wrote called “My Bunkbed as an Antidote.” This poem is where the title of the exhibition came from. Here’s an excerpt, recorded in her voice from within the prison.
Tomiekia Johnson: I’ve been giving it some thought about how the only door I can open in prison is an invisible one, leading to my bunk bed. It calls me when it wants and needs me. Sometimes it betrays my insomnia, giving me a few drips of sleep.
Lucy Kang: I want to turn now to look at what it took for Tomiekia and Chantell to curate the show from inside prison. One of the first steps was finding other incarcerated artists to work with. That wasn’t easy because of the restrictions placed on them by the prison. Plus, the planning process took place during Covid lockdowns. Here’s Chantell.
Chantell-Jeannette Black: It was very challenging within this particular institution because I believe we are currently the nation’s or one of the top largest prisons within the world. And so, it’s very big for a women’s institution specifically, not in comparison to men’s. We have three separate yards. And within those three separate yards, we can’t really intermix. Like I’m not allowed on another yard.
Lucy Kang: The yards are named alphabetically. During the time that they were planning the show, Tomiekia was in C as in Charlie yard, while Chantell was in B as in Bravo yard. When the project kicked off they were in the same yard, but later got moved to different ones.
So they used a go-between. But not a person. It was a notebook – one of those lined composition journals I remember from school.
Chantell-Jeannette Black: Tomiekia and I came up with a wonderful plan of a notebook that we can pass around. So when you go to education or medical or the law library or wherever we go, where we know we can meet at, can pass the notebook and say, can you get this to so and so? Can you get this to the next unit? And then people, it’s like a prison culture to say, like, can you pass this notebook, or can you pass just the letter, because somebody? That is pretty common to do that. And that is one tool that we use to overcome the barrier of being separated, being on quarantine, and having limited access to one another.
Lucy Kang: The notebook included a description of the project and a list of potential artists that grew as the notebook made its way around the prison.
Chantell-Jeannette Black: It took a lot of effort to coordinate between Tomiekia and I to get that notebook between the yards. We would meet on main yard at the law library and be able to switch it off there and pass it around. And sometimes, it was definitely during Covid, so we had to wait a few weeks at times.
Lucy Kang: Chantell explains their strategy through a phone call. Halfway through, you’ll hear an automated voice break in. It’s just one reminder of the many limitations on communications inside prisons.
Chantell-Jeannette Black: Because of the Covid quarantines and the limited networking and personal skills, we had to do a little more of by word, by word of mouth, through a grapevine, like –
Recording: This call and or telephone numbers will be monitored and recorded.
Chantell-Jeannette Black: – and we kind of had to trust on reputation.
Lucy Kang: Then once the artists were selected, Chantell and Tomiekia worked with them to produce their pieces. Here’s Tomiekia again.
Tomiekia Johnson: I offered them art supplies. I helped them write their biographies, artist statements, art descriptions, and I broke down the value of their pieces, teaching them how to evaluate them. But artists are like students at homework. They mostly work on their own, in their own settings.
Lucy Kang: Prisons, jails and detention centers are built on the logic of confinement, of surveillance, and of erasure from public life. And that means the voices of people who are incarcerated are routinely censored, even though they are the only ones who can really speak to the human impacts of incarceration.
Chantell also made work for the show. One really stood out to me. “Letter to my Bed” features a poem painted onto a bedsheet with images of a tree, moon and sun.
Chantell-Jeannette Black: And I actually wrote the letter on an actual sheet because the PIA, the Prison Institute Authority that we are all issued when we come into the prison. We each get two sheets, a pillowcase and the basics.
Lucy Kang: The California Prison Industry Authority sheets are made by incarcerated people and distributed within prisons for them to use.
Chantell-Jeannette Black: And in the prison, in this particular prison, they put eight women in one room, which is about 18 by 18 feet, square feet. So, it’s not a lot of space. Your bunk space is really where we live, do our homework, our study time, our meditations, our reflection. And with the people in the room, the only way you can feel like you’re alone is by hanging up a sheet, either clipping it up or tying a shoelace from one end of your bunk post to the other end and hanging your sheet over it. So I wrote a letter thanks to the sheet, the privacy and the solitude that it gives me with the illusion of separating myself in my own little space from everyone else.
Lucy Kang: Chantell then painted the words and images onto the sheet with a paintbrush, working with a paperclip for the finest lines. She used a hair dryer to heat set the paint so the sheet could be washed. Here’s an excerpt from that poem in her own voice.
Chantell-Jeannette Black: I am utmost grateful for the illusion of privacy that you provide when I hang my sheet across your line. You have been my only resource for healing the abundance of scars within and without. It is only here where I can close my eyes and be the mother I was meant to be. Where I can hold her again, laugh and play with my family. I can release all the tears felt from grief through the years. Time has no meaning other than knowing the world outside continues without me.
Lucy Kang: As curators of The Only Door I Can Open, Chantell and Tomiekia were supported by the organization Empowerment Avenue.
I first heard about Empowerment Avenue through their projects to help writers who are incarcerated get their work published. The organization’s executive director is Rahsaan “New York” Thomas. You might have heard him as a host on the award-winning podcast Ear Hustle.
Rahsaan Thomas: This program got started because I needed it. I was in prison, and I was about what I was witnessing. I became a person who was working for the newsroom, writing articles for San Quentin News. I became a co-host of Ear Hustle and I also got involved in making documentary films, but I needed more. I felt like the economic piece was missing, and I felt like at a certain point I was just preaching to the same people, preaching to the choir. And so I longed to get my voice past the choir into bigger ponds. And to like get economically compensated for it. And at the same time, I was watching the artists around me give their art away to nonprofits. So economic empowerment was critical.
And so Empowerment Avenue started as a concept that I saw was necessary because as a writer, I was just, I only got eight stories published in seven years and only made 400 on my own. But meanwhile, it was a guy I was incarcerated with. He had made a connection with an editor at a magazine who not only hired him to be a columnist, but acted as a person who would help him pitch his stories to other organizations. And he was getting published left and right. And I was like, man, not only do I need somebody like that, everybody needs somebody like that if you’re a writer and you’re incarcerated.
Lucy Kang: Editors who are willing to work with writers inside prisons provide really crucial access to platforms that are otherwise denied to them. And Empowerment Avenue tries to facilitate relationships that get incarcerated artists and writers published and paid.
Rahsaan was an interesting person to talk to for this story because he’s also worked as an art curator. That’s during his time inside San Quentin.
Rahsaan Thomas: First of all, I start out like not knowing how to curate anything, but just knowing that certain artwork was beautiful to me and wanting to share that artwork, what I saw with the world.
Lucy Kang: So Rahsaan knows firsthand about the challenges that Chantell and Tomiekia went through. And just like them, he had to learn how to manage time. Things sometimes take longer in prison. Like longer than you think. Especially during the height of Covid lockdowns.
Rahsaan Thomas: I kind of planned for it. Like, I know that prison’s going lockdown, so I can’t wait till the last minute. You have to work ahead of time and not behind and make it happen. I think the most interesting part for me is as a curator for the first time, I’m asking people to give me their artwork in January and December and November for a show that basically almost a year away, nine, 10 months away. And so they have to trust my vision, right? They have to believe in me. And so having those relationships with all these guys in place was really key. And I’m honored that they did trust me. They, you know, they all gave me their artwork. And everybody in that exhibit made 600 bucks off the top. And so I’m really proud of that, that we’re able to do that and set a new trend. Like normally when you’re in a museum, all you get is exposure. This time we got the guys paid.
Lucy Kang: Rahsaan took what he had learned and wrote a guide to share with Chantell and Tomiekia as they prepared to curate The Only Door I Can Open. It was just one way that he and his colleague Christine Lashaw, Director of Visual Arts for Liberation, supported them.
Chantell-Jeannette Black: From start to finish, it was a lot of teamwork, a lot of communication, a lot of letter writing, and a lot of phone calls. This is the first exhibit I have ever curated or co-curated. Honestly, this project, this whole exhibit would not be possible without the collaborative teamwork and open minded communication that Tomiekia and I both had with Empowerment Avenue.
Tomiekia Johnson: And I always felt like I was included, like my voice was being heard. And we moved into the actual production days. They did a video visit with me where I could see the actual art space, the museum space. I got videograms of the dance production. Like, it was so thorough and so professional. It exceeded all my expectations.
Lucy Kang: For Rahsaan, it was especially important to uplift the voices of incarcerated women. Incarceration impacts the over 190,000 women and girls currently held in prisons, jails, and correctional and detention centers in the United States differently than it does men.
Rahsaan Thomas: I feel like women are not given the honor and respect that they deserve in this world in general. And incarcerated women, forget about it. For example, the men’s prison has access to all this art supplies and a thriving art program, and the women’s prison did not have that. And they’re the fastest growing prison population. And Chowchilla’s one of the, if not the biggest, women’s facility in the country, if not the world. And so we need to shine some light on how things are done there and what needs to be improved.
Lucy Kang: In fact, the Prison Policy Initiative says that, quote, “women in prison are worse off than men, both leading up to and during their incarceration.” And that’s troubling because the number of women being incarcerated is rising at double the rate of men. And the thing is, we don’t really know why that is, because the data is inconsistent or incomplete. And gender based violence definitely plays a role. Women are often incarcerated for fighting back against their abusers. Incarcerated women are three times as likely as men to be sexually abused by prison or jail staff. And that’s for women across the board, without slicing it down even further into women of color and queer and trans women.
Prisons and other carceral institutions are dehumanizing. But art can push against that, even in places where people are often reduced to objects. It can remind us of the brutality, punishment and control inherent to prisons and instead help us imagine communities that are built on care. Care that acknowledges our humanity. Like healthcare for everyone. And education and housing. And having a bed that’s not in a cage. Here’s Chantell.
Chantell-Jeannette Black: So, the thing that’s really important that I hope people get out of this exhibit is to see the humanity and individuality of women incarcerated. Having that artistic platform to speak up and be heard, that is invaluable to me. It’s just so precious and important for each one of us to be able to speak up and be heard and seen as the mothers, daughters, sisters that we are, not what the media portrays people incarcerated to be.
Lucy Kang: The Only Door I Can Open and If I Give You My Sorrows are collaborations between Flyaway Productions, Empowerment Avenue, and the Museum of the African Diaspora. You can catch The Only Door I Can Open starting February 1st and If I Give You My Sorrows starting January 31st at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
The music you heard in this episode was composed for If I Give You My Sorrows, and the album is available for purchase online. We’ll have links to all those and more at focmedia.org. And that does it for today’s show. I’m Lucy Kang. Thanks for listening to Making Contact.
