- Hello, I'm Beth MacMillan, and welcome to "Artifacts."

In our featured segment, we take a look inside the decommissioned Nevada State Prison and enter "Far Beyond the Walls," an immersive art exhibition creating awareness around incarceration in the US.

- [Recording] A man can hope while in prison.

Our children hope we will return one day.

Our wives hope we will return to help support the family.

Our mothers hope we will return to them one day.

Behave and do something positive when you are in there.

I was told.

- "Far Beyond the Walls" is an exhibition project that I put together.

My name's Frances Melhop.

I am an artist, a curator, and contemporary art gallery director.

"Far Beyond the Walls" is a series of exhibitions.

It is seven solo exhibitions and two group exhibitions held in the Nevada State Prison, which is decommissioned.

The exhibitions are exploring many different mediums.

There's oil paint, there is ceramic work, there is sculpture, there's photography.

We also have poetry and a soundscape.

- [Recording] I can't change the past.

I can't change me and I can't change the future.

- The artists have taken over different cell blocks, areas like the maximum security, the culinary section, the muster room.

They have transformed these spaces into gallery spaces.

They're investigating ideas of confinement and incarceration through their artwork.

This is the work of Glen Cartilage.

Glen is a former criminal defense lawyer who worked in this prison with people on death row.

Once she retired, she devoted herself to being an artist.

Glen is referring to a cemetery down south where people who've been executed from prison are still treated as numbers.

They still don't have their names on their grave sites.

So this carceral cloth, she's made it exactly the size of a commissary machine.

All of these items are things that you can buy while you're in prison.

She has, again, used the motif of the black and white tiles.

It is the size of a cell that two people would occupy.

So always she's working with scale as an important factor within these carceral cloths.

Within that, she has made these portraits of formerly incarcerated people.

They are from a series called "P2P," which is short for "Prisoners to Paper Dolls."

When people come out of prison, they are treated in a very two-dimensional manner.

And so each of these portraits is painted as if it's one of the paper dolls that we used to play with when we were little kids.

This area here is still the infirmary and basically it was three cells that were divided into a larger space where people would recover from injuries or surgery.

The concrete blocks are actually from onsite at the prison.

So because it's a historic building, I've had to use very different installation tactics.

These are more formally incarcerated people that Jennifer Garza Quinn photographed for Glen and then Glen painted them, and she's quite an academic painter.

The soundscape that you can hear behind us is by Gia Dryer.

Gia has melded their own music with interviews with formerly incarcerated people that Glen actually recorded.

We're in the bullpen.

It's where people are brought to when they're first incarcerated while the prison is trying to work out where they're going to be housed.

This area is devoted to Jennifer Garza Quinn, who is a photographer.

This particular series is called "Imprints and Abstractions," ruined mugshots that she found in an abandoned police station in Detroit.

And so all of these are enlargements of people's identity mugshots that were scattered all over the floor in this abandoned building where you can also see the kind of chemical collapse of the emulsions.

We're in the barber's cell of cell block one east.

This is the work of Lisa Jarrett.

Lisa got very excited when I showed her this space because her work is basically very concerned with migration and care.

All of her work is thinking about Black femininity.

And when she saw this space, she created this installation and it is actually impossible escape plans that are woven from hair.

This cell block is devoted to John Pierro Esoma.

He is from Naples in Italy.

And this series, he spent 10 years going into the psychiatric criminal prisons in Naples and photographing the spaces and the people in there.

They were closed down in 2014, but he has a body of work that we've put all through these cell blocks.

These red areas that are on the walls are actually designated spaces that the prisoners were allowed to hang their images and photographs in.

And the rest was supposed to be kept clear.

We're actually in the muster room or we are in the entrance to the muster room, which is where the guards used to get ready, rest between shifts.

We have Sean Griffin's poetry and Sean is currently the Nevada Poet Laureate.

- Frances reached out to discuss doing this exhibition.

I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.

I've been teaching at the prison for 30 plus years, teaching a poetry workshop and I said, "You can have whatever I've done.

I hope you use it and it'll give voice to the guys' work inside."

- These poems are actually, I see them as portraits of his students.

They found poetry and found a way to focus, a creative focus, and I feel like this is a super important aspect of this whole exhibition.

- When I first started teaching out there, you know, I got so much grief about teaching this.

Poetry particularly gets a bad rap, but, you know, it's the most rewarding thing I do.

It's the one thing that grounds me.

It's a time to be real with people and just be straight and be who I am.

They can be who they are.

They lose their back number for an hour and a half.

They're not a man tied up in denim and a crime.

They're a person tied up in what might happen in the future and what they can do with their language.

- He's really made a huge difference to their lives.

All of them, basically, you know, they really said, "Poetry saved my life or Sean Griffin saved my life."

- It was a really tough exhibition.

I took one of the guys who was also in the workshop with me, but had been released and it was very hard for him.

It was like having to go back and not being able to get out.

One of the guys, Bo Brown, who's been in my workshop for many years, specifically, his poem moved many people to tears.

And when I told him that, you know, it was like letting him out of jail for that time.

He was free again 'cause his words had moved beyond the prison to other people's lives.

And that was profound.

- The people that are behind bars are completely invisible to us.

I wanted to give them a voice, but also to just start a conversation surrounding this issue because I feel like rehabilitation is not happening that much.

- The recidivism rate is around 60 to 70% on every prison in the United States.

You know, you have an X on your forehead after you get out because you're a felon.

And so getting a job, getting a house, getting a relationship, anything, it's beyond difficult.

It's why we're getting more of these creative writing classes started in all the prisons.

They're support that really changes lives and gets people out and helps 'em stay out.

- If we can humanize the people that are incarcerated, then at least it's starting to change the social conditioning that we grow up with.

Art is such a language and it's such a great communication tool when you can't use words.

You're dehumanized systematically when you're inside and treated as a number.

And being able to hold onto your identity and hold onto your, you know, your self-respect and dignity I think is very, very important.

- [Recording] I continue to press on and I continue to look at the positive in my life, not on the negative.

It's been a long time since I've had to think about the past, but I want people to know what I went through.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Artifacts" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pierce Motors.

Heidemarie Rochlin.

In memory of Sue McDowell.

And by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(bright jazz music)