Captive Arts

Captive Arts seeks to fill a considerable gap in scholarly, activist and practitioner understandings of incarcerated artists and of creative expression in prisons.

While imprisonment is a profoundly detrimental experience, actively curtailing fundamental freedoms and animating our cultural infatuation with hostile and long punishments in Western neoliberal societies, the arts - in their various manifestations from visual art, sculpture, music, theatre, poetry and creative writing, among others - are thriving inside prisons. This project seeks to conceptually and empirically understand this curious symbiosis between creative expression and the repressive features of incarceration.

Captive Arts unpacks the perspectives of artists inside prisons and of former prisoner artists and includes the accounts of arts therapists, arts practitioners, and arts educators who work in prisons. All these cohorts of research participants offer a previously unexplored insight into the relationship between creative expression, identity and the experience of punishment.

The project’s core research question is: who are prisoner artists and how does the experience of imprisonment shape their identity, artistic outputs and their reception within and beyond prison walls? Conceptually, the project seeks to unsettle the ideological underpinnings behind the flourishing of the arts inside carceral settings and question the arts’ penal function in the 21st Century. Empirically, it aims to unveil the largely peripheralized genre of prisoner arts and considers the arts’ promise for communicating subjectivity, expression, and emotions in prisons.

The study adopts an intersectional lens, engaging with artists from diverse backgrounds, and looks at various forms of arts. The project promotes a new, arts-based qualitative methodology through which to study the lived experiences of incarcerated persons that is more affective, accessible, and thus politically effective for a critique of punishment. It also seeks to interrogate the possibilities of ‘arts from prison’ as movement, contemplating prisoner arts’ promise to challenge popular, punitive and carceral sentiments. In so doing, this study engages critically with the growing interest in the emancipatory potential of the arts more generally.