“Art helps to free people even while incarcerated,” Renaldo Hudson says in the new book Carving Out Rights from Inside the Prison Industrial Complex. Hudson should know. In September 2020, he was released from Danville Correctional Center, after spending 37 years behind bars. “There’s a tremendous amount of freedom when you can say what you want to say with your art, do what you want to do with it,” Hudson continues. “Prison may restrict the tools you use to express yourself, but it can’t restrict your expression.”
Article 12, which touches on one’s right to privacy, is portrayed in an incredibly detailed print by Alex Koehler. The text of the article takes up the top half, clearly laid out in all caps, while the bottom half shows a pair of eyes staring out of a desktop computer, set atop a table which reads “Your Privacy is Our Own.” Similarly, the illustration for article 20, by Charles McLaurin, is impeccable; the lettering looks almost computer-generated. Below the text, on the right to peaceful assembly, are three split scenes of people gathering, while in the foreground spectators look on.
The violation of human rights is just as apparent in Prisoners’ Inventions, though here the violations make themselves apparent in more commonplace ways. The book is a collaboration between Half Letter Press, the publishing imprint of Temporary Services, and a formerly incarcerated artist who went by the moniker Angelo. (Angelo passed away in 2016.) Angelo started as a pen pal to Marc Fischer, who runs Temporary Services along with Brett Bloom. Angelo often sent along detailed illustrations that depicted historical scenes, and sometimes included descriptions of inventions he had seen in prison. Eventually, Temporary Services had the idea to put together a booklet illustrating these inventions, resulting in numerous exhibitions as well as an earlier version of this book that was published in 2003 by WhiteWalls, but has long since been out of print. The new book is completely re-envisioned and includes new drawings, a new foreword, and blueprints Angelo drew of his cell.
Several seem incredibly dangerous, and in fact, the publishers include a cautionary tale not to try these at home. There are “toilet paper bombs,” which involves setting fire to rolls of toilet paper, putting them under a metal object that conducts heat, such as a shelf, and then putting whatever food you are trying to heat on the metal. In this way, meals like grilled cheese can be made. Others involved making impromptu appliances, such as an immersion heater or a cigarette lighter, using paper clips or razor blades as makeshift electrical plugs.
