Coming up this time on Art Rocks!

A prominent New Orleans cultural institution takes a deep dive into the history of incarceration in Louisiana.

Classic portraiture inspires unique contemporary image making and images made to inspire conversation.

These stories, coming up now on Art rocks.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPB, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music, and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum culture cultivated Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello.

Thank you for joining us for this edition of Art rocks with me.

James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

The historic New Orleans collection prides itself on its research, its mission to preserve the state's material culture and the exhibition spaces it maintains in historic buildings around the French Quarter.

To showcase and interpret it.

The facility spent six years researching the history of incarceration in Louisiana, and the links between the institutionalized slavery of the 18th and 19th centuries and the mass incarceration that is a fact of life in Louisiana today.

The resulting exhibit, Captive State Louisiana and the Makings of Mass Incarceration, explores how three centuries of history led to Louisiana becoming the incarceration capital of the world.

His historic New Orleans collection curator Eric Seaforth, to share the museum's findings with us now, the United States incarcerates more people than just about any other country in the world.

It's about 600 or so people incarcerated per 100,000 Louisiana incarcerates more people than any other state in the United States, and the rate is well above that of the United States.

We incarcerate about one out of every 100 people.

When we went back and looked at the 300 year history of incarceration in Louisiana, what we found overwhelmingly was that there a historic link between the systems of slavery and of mass incarceration.

Today, that story really starts with the founding of New Orleans by the French.

The passing of a set of laws known as the Code Noir in 1724, the series of laws related specifically to people of African descent, largely enslaved people, and some religious minorities.

What we see is public punishment that's violent towards incarcerated people.

You see things like branding with Fort Lee's dismemberment, capital punishment taking place in Jackson Square during the Spanish era, which starts in the 1760s and runs through the end of the century.

What you see is city building and that includes levees being built, the roads being improved, the construction of the Carondelet Canal, which links Bayou Saint John with the river and is now the Lafayette Greenway.

All of this work, that is historians we track in the Spanish era.

It's being done with forced labor or from people that are enslaved, people that are incarcerated, or people that are enslaved and incarcerated.

They're cleaning the streets.

They're building the streets.

They're fixing potholes, maintaining the levees, and building the Carondelet Canal.

In the 18th century, during the colonial era, we have a handful of court cases on display.

There's a woman.

Her name is Jeanette, who was a free person of color.

And she gets in trouble for hosting dinners with enslaved people.

This is a fairly large transgression at the time, and her punishment is enslavement, so she is a free person who the city condemns to enslavement for holding meetings of enslaved people.

Which of course, again can lead to a breakdown in the white supremacist slave society that the colonial government is trying to maintain.

It is maintaining in the early 1800s, New Orleans becomes American, and it also becomes the center of the domestic slave trade in the United States.

So another way of saying that is New Orleans was the largest market for the sale of people in the United States of America prior to the Civil War.

At this moment, a prison system is built up to maintain the system of slavery that's going on in this city.

In the surrounding areas.

The jail really did a couple of things.

So police jail, it is a place where people that had escaped enslavement had been captured, were held until they're enslavers could come and pick them up as a place of deposit for the police.

It was a place where urban enslavers and enslavers from around the area could send an enslaved person for punishment if they did not want to meet out the punishment themselves.

And it was also a place where free people of color, of which there was a large population in New Orleans, were wrongly imprisoned.

If they didn't have appropriate freedom papers, or if the arresting officer was uninterested in their freedom papers.

When that happens, quite a bit as well.

It's during the same era that you see the development of the chain gang system, which is when a group of incarcerated people, typically men, were forced to work on municipal projects wearing chains.

This system comes out of the Caribbean to the United States, something we're all familiar with via New Orleans.

So it really starts in New Orleans around 1815, 1820 or so.

So Alexis de Tocqueville, Frenchman, came to the United States in the 1830s.

He traveled extensively across the country and wrote about his travels in a work known as Democracy in America.

As part of his travels, he comes to New Orleans, and one of the things that he writes about in New Orleans is the jail is just off of Jackson Square, so you can build a jail.

And he specifically notes how filthy the conditions are, how inhumane they are, how the people incarcerated there are in filth.

Next to hogs in his language.

And he talks about there being no sense of reform for the individuals there or anything like that, but just taming their malice again, his term.

So it's interesting as we think about incarceration and the various goals that incarceration can have, he seems to think the only outcome that he's viewing as a visitor to the New Orleans jail in 1833 is the dehumanization of the people incarcerated there in the 19th century, prior to the Civil War.

There is a man named Rufus Kinsman.

He was a free black sailor from the north.

He was on a boat working and his boat came to port in New Orleans.

This is just before a civil war in 1850s, and at this point, New Orleans is really cracking down on the movement of black people in the state, specifically free black people, because they're afraid of what the visual of a free black person might do to enslaved people.

In other words, it might encourage them to fight more against this system of enslavement.

So they pass a series of what's called the Negro Seamen's Acts, and they use police jails to incarcerate free black people, specifically free black sailors.

So he comes down, he gets off his boat as it's important and unloads its cargo.

And he's immediately arrested and sent to the police jail as a fugitive slave.

In other words, he's misidentified as an enslaved person that escaped enslavement, and he is required to stay in the police jail until he can prove he's a free person or until a slave, or can come and pay the cost of his room and board and take custody of them.

He ends up being in the police jail for over a year, which is not uncommon, and is fortunate in that a white warrior from the northeast gets involved in this case, eventually helps get his freedom, and he leaves under custodianship of a captain on the way to Liverpool.

Behind me are two images of incarceration in Louisiana around 1900.

On my left is an image of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at the time, which was in Baton Rouge and was known as the walls.

In this era, the white prisoners, the white men incarcerated were held at the walls and worked at a textile factory.

So that's what you see behind me.

This experience was very different from the majority of incarcerated people during this era, which were it was about 75% black, 25%, white prisoners.

Black prisoners in Louisiana during this era largely worked outside in agriculture work or in levee maintenance, railroad building, that type of thing under extremely dangerous conditions.

And on an average year between 1870 and 1900, about 100 people died while doing this type of work, which is an extremely high number when you consider there are about 700 incarcerated people each year.

So we see moments in the state's history of increased rates of incarceration.

One happens before the Civil War as the system of slavery is enlarging and New Orleans becomes the largest market for the sale of people in the country.

We see it happen again in the state after reconstruction with the convict lease, when there's a large increase in incarceration and convictions, specifically of black Louisianans filling out the work force of the lessee.

His name is Samuel James, a former Confederate officer.

And if we track the genealogy of Angola, we know that 200 years ago, roughly, it was owned by the largest slave trader in the United States, possession of those plantations.

It was really a series of about half dozen plantations in that creek in the Mississippi River, by the border with Mississippi.

Ownership of those plantations eventually go to Samuel James, who was the Confederate officer who operated and owned the convict lease.

So from 1870 to 1900, Samuel, James or his family have full custodianship of every person convicted of a felony in the state of Louisiana, and they work the majority of them at their plantations at Angola.

In 1901, the state of Louisiana retakes possession of Angola and retakes custodianship of people convicted of felonies, and by 1916 or thereabouts, Louisiana State Penitentiary has moved from Baton Rouge to Angola, and today there remain incarcerated people disproportionately black, working in the fields at Angola, the same space where they were working 200 years ago under the largest slave trader in the United States.

And not all of them are paid and pay averages for people working on the farm line.

$0.02 an hour.

There's a direct link historically between the conditions and environment of forced labor and incarceration at the state's largest penitentiary, to that of the plantation and slave system of the 1830s in Louisiana.

For much of Louisiana's history, women and men were incarcerated in the same facility, so typically segregated by gender.

Women are incarcerated black and white, in Angola from 1880 until the 1960s.

At that point, the state opens to Louisiana Correctional Institute for women are LCI W at Saint Gabriel, and that's the first women's prison in the state of Louisiana.

During the 1970s, 80s and 90s, we had a period of tough on crime rhetoric from our politicians that resulted in a series of laws that sent more people to prison for longer amounts of time, that dramatically increased the population of people that were incarcerated in the state and in the United States as a whole.

Another thing we did in Louisiana specifically, is we worked to end the possibility of parole for people with life sentences.

So prior to 1970, a typical life sentence included a provision for parole eligibility.

After about a decade.

These were called ten six sentences.

After ten years and six months, a person was eligible for parole.

It doesn't mean they necessarily came home.

It meant they had the eligibility of receiving parole by the end of the 1970s.

Louisiana has done away with this entirely.

Whereas a person receiving a life sentence by 1980 will be incarcerated by the state Department of Corrections until they die.

One of the things we wanted to end with was a moment of hope, or at least the appreciation that this is something that people have made and people can change.

And we see that through the exhibition that the ways in which we incarcerate people in Louisiana change over the centuries.

So in 1880, Louisiana writes a law that requires only nine of 12 jurors to concur, to convict someone of a felony that's codified into the 1898 Louisiana State Constitution and last through the entire 18th of the 20th century with a small tweak where we say you need ten of 12 jurors to concur, but unanimity is not required at any point for felony convictions in Louisiana from 1880 into the 21st century.

In 2017, the people of Louisiana vote to change the state's constitution and require 12 of 12 jurors to concur to pass a felony conviction, and it was over 60% of voters agreed to that requirement in the state's constitution, which changed the way we as a state convict people.

It's interesting.

Shortly after that change, the United States government ruled it a violation of the US Constitution to have non unanimous juries.

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For more on these exhibitions and others, consider Country Roads Magazine available in print, online, or by e-newsletter.

Artists derive inspiration from many sources, and sometimes artists might look at the same objects and perceive totally different things.

Virginia artist Kristen Skis finds inspiration in old portraiture.

Her mixed media twists on it include the use of fiber and photography, and her singular style is landing in a multitude of collections.

Let's come and see why.

We.

So I knit cozies for people think tea cozy.

Like a British tea cozy.

Just a warm covering to keep something warm and snuggly.

But my cozies are a little more aggressive in their cozying.

They are full body coverings that covers most of our identifiable features.

The legs.

They're almost always bare because I find that hysterical to feel like people aren't wearing pants under the cozy.

And I also think knees are kind of funny, but.

I love art history in general, so I was really inspired by portraiture, painting and estate painting with people showing off their estate by posing in a painting.

And so I thought of these very constructed, very posed, very formal photographs.

And that's how I kind of began to think of them.

Not as cozy, but as cozy photographs.

So for me, the photograph is the piece.

The cozy is a part of the piece.

Through that, I kind of have this conversation with them about how they present themselves to the world and what's important to them, and how we communicate to an audience who they are as people.

And it started with my friends and family, because they are very willing to go along with my ideas here.

Yeah, there you go.

Yeah.

About my crazy artist things that I come up with.

So they're used to that, this very first personal series.

And it's my mother and dad and, basically how it went was mom, dad, can you tell your Airstream to the Walmart parking lot and stand in these knitted things for me?

Okay.

But I guess.

So the actual sitting down and knitting is when I get to go to my studio, I can't even really listen to music or podcasts or anything because I have to keep count.

so it's a lot of setting up the machine, which she is old and spinning.

So, you know, I have to oil it down with WD 40 before we begin, and make sure she's ready to go.

The stitch pattern is pretty unique.

It's something I developed early on in the series, and it's like two stitches.

Skip a stitch, one stitch, skip a stitch, two stitches, and it's just something I made up.

I liked the pattern.

I like that it was a little, it had a little gap there and created a vertical stripe.

So that is and everyone is always that sort of three stitch pattern.

And then I have to do the threading and make sure it's just right before I start knitting.

000.

I start it the same way every time.

I have a very, specific pattern to begin with.

I do sets in 20, and I always, always start on the same side because, I do have ADHD, and if my mind wanders and I lose count, I have to kind of start all over.

So I have a clicker and I have a system so that I keep myself on track.

It's very meditative, and just emptying my mind and counting is nice to do.

any time my mind wanders, I am in trouble, so I have to.

It is very much a practice.

My second half.

I'm always happy to have like a whole conversation and see what kind of interesting things we can come up with, because it's so fun and I enjoy talking with people and working with people, and I like to facilitate these experiences.

I think it's memorable and interesting, and I like that people are a part of my work.

So I never thought that people would be as weird as me, and I love that they want to just get on board with this strange, cozy train.

The work of Ohio based artist David Butler is a catalyst for conversation.

Working within the figurative painting tradition, Butler explores culture and history and illustrates the intersection between identity, race and equality.

Here's his story.

My inspiration comes from my existence as a black male in society.

I have a certain viewpoint of how of the world that was given to me, and I'm also going through a lot of processes of unlearning the things that I learned throughout my life.

I think that to be better humans, we have to begin to unlearn.

And for me, my artwork is always, a process of like asking the questions that are hard for me to answer.

and then also trying to pose those questions to society to see if I'm alone in this pursuit or if, I mean, am I on the right track when I come to when it comes to how I'm thinking about this, sometimes I get it right.

Sometimes I don't.

This body of work is a group of paintings called idle.

They are a series of appropriated pulp fiction novel covers from the 1950s all the way to late 60s, early 70s.

I took those covers that originally had white engineers on the covers and replaced them with women of color who I knew, and also some of them who I don't know and should try to have a conversation about how we see black womanhood and within society, and whose gaze is, the black woman.

For when it comes to being on display in this type of way, most of these covers kind of cover issues of romance, relationships.

But they also were like kind of these, propaganda tales.

So to keep you away from the, you know, harlequin woman, you know, and keep you away from the, the Jezebel's of the world.

and I think that that framing of, misogyny is kind of what I was injected with as a young man.

Most of the times when we talk about the creative arts and when we talk about paintings in general, we're always talking about how archival they are, what they're worth, and how are you supposed to sell them.

So when people see these four year old paintings that are on paper, and one of the main questions I get is like, how are you supposed to sell these?

Well, I've never intended to sell these until they had their lifespan.

So when I grad school started, I created a body of work that was solely for not being in the archive.

This is going to be work that actually has a lifespan, that actually goes through things, that actually gets crumpled up, that actually gets beat up bent like, you know, punctured.

So when you think about the fact that this artwork was created with our gaze and how we see women in black womanhood, and we think about what when they have to go through and society, it's an allegory for their lives as world driving through all these different bends, twists, turns and kind of this crumpling by societal norms and the gaze of how the boxes that we put them in all the time.

And so now, is she worth something?

Is she still important to you, even though she's been through something and had a lifespan that has a history to it?

So is there still beauty there?

And I think that that creates a larger conversation for the work, and it allows for us to kind of engage with it in a way to where this work is uniquely, already archived.

In a way, it's had nine different provocations since we since I put the work up in Philadelphia in 2013.

And now that we, ten years and beyond, we now can start to see these characters, their story, and but they're kind of a new story is beginning.

So when you see something that says to black for have emotional meaning of to black was mostly like, you know, being to bad being a bad woman but being to black if you equal bad to black.

And as a black woman on the cover has a whole different cultural context now.

So that's where I am starting to kind of toy with the original type and text of the covers to kind of build out this idea that, you know, these were original thoughts about just women in general.

And when we place these thoughts into a cultural context and we start to think about things in a more intersectional way, then we can have like larger conversations about how those original I thoughts that were made for a certain group of people can perpetuate themselves through different cultures and subcultures that we exist in today.

I would say the most rewarding thing for me is the share out is the exchange of just participation with the exchange.

That's the best part.

We make the things and, and people come see the things, and we have conversations about those things, or we share in the energy of those things.

And sometimes words don't need to be said.

Sometimes explanations don't need to be given.

Sometimes it's just taking it in and seeing people take in the work.

That's one of my favorite, most gratifying parts, is seeing people actually take in the work and be in the space and say, oh wow, this is something that is affecting me right now, and I don't know exactly like or how or why, but it makes me feel a certain type of way.

And I think that that's the best part about being an artist is just making sure that you are engaging in the exchange with the people.

And that is that.

For this edition of Art rocks, part of our 12 consecutive season, each season showcases the work of a Louisiana artist, and you can find every episode we do in our online archive at LPB.

Dot org slash art rocks and if stories like these move, you, consider picking up a free copy of Country Roads magazine.

It's a vital guide for learning what's shaping Louisiana's cultural life all across the state.

Until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thank you for watching.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPB.

Offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music, and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture cultivated Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

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