Jailbird Installations
Painted birds stood in for prisoners, guards, and judges in the installation “Jail Birds & Flowers” at the Kleinert James Center for the Arts in Woodstock, NY, 2014.
In 2015, I reworked the installation in Catskill, NY, as Jail Birds & The New Jim Crow. It was part of a two county program on Creating Justice at the Greene County Council for the Arts Gallery on Main Street. The New Jim Crow references Michelle Alexander’s book of the same name.
At both installations, four persons who had worked professionally or volunteered in prisons, spoke and Andre Noel, who had learned modern dance from a volunteer choreographer, Susan Slotnick, during part of his fifteen year incarceration, spoke and performed on the installation.
Both projects drew large, vociferous crowds including mothers of inmates, ex-prisoners, and reformers, eager to tell their own harsh experiences and calling for changes in the penal system of arrests and treatment of inmates. There are several New York State prisons in the nearby areas.