Mary Louise Schumacher

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A photograph is a lot like a crime scene, says artist Nigel Poor. If you take your time and look carefully, it will eventually offer up its secrets.

It may “reveal something complex and interesting,” she says in a videotaped discussion with a circle of men at San Quentin State Prison in California, where she teaches a course in the history of photography.

Once a person is trained to look deeply at photographs, he or she will look at the world itself differently and may see “fascination everywhere,” she adds, quoting one of the inmates she’s worked with, Ruben Ramirez.

For a while, Poor and the men in her classes pored over images from the history of photography, annotating images and writing personal responses.

A show at the Milwaukee Art Museum about Poor’s engagement at the prison – "The San Quentin Project" – includes a recorded essay by Michael Nelson, an inmate serving a 25-to-life sentence, written while in solitary confinement.

Nelson’s essay is not only a meditation on photographs of vacant film screens by Hiroshi Sugimoto and Richard Misrach, a contemplation on the changing landscape of media and art. It is also a personal expression about being alone in prison, of feeling left behind.

“The darkness of the theater sets the mood,” says Nelson in the recording playing in the gallery space with a bench and a view of the Sugimoto and Misrach photographs. “The illuminated screen playing the role of a mouth whose light screams out to be heard, to be seen. The EXIT signs … reminders of where all the absent characters have gone.”

A discovered trove

More recently, San Quentin officials unearthed boxes of thousands of unexplored negatives taken with an antiquated, large-format camera and dating from the 1940s to the 1980s. They turned them over to Poor.

Never intended for public consumption, most of the images are clinical documents from the once-infamous California lockup. Some pictures have an obvious forensic use. They are evidence of violent acts or attempted escapes.

But unexpected outliers have turned up, too – more compassionate shots of prison visits, social gatherings or sports activities in which the context is mostly lost to time, hinted at by scribbled notations on the negative envelopes.

Poor has been digitizing the images and bringing them into her classes, where the inmates are in a unique position to decipher them and find meaning in them as well. They become objects of personal discovery, a canvas of sorts for handwritten words committed directly to the images. Several of these artworks are on view in the MAM show.

In one of the more poignant works, Ramirez, the inmate Poor likes to quote, wrote eloquently about arms buttressing a “once proud castle.” The writing is on a photograph of a stabbing victim’s limp body held up to the camera by two people. Ramirez's words spread across the man's bare back.

“You don’t know if he’s alive or dead, I really don’t know” says Poor of the victim in the picture. She gets emotional talking about Ramirez's reflections.

“He was one of the few guys I was actually afraid of when I met him, and I don’t really know why,” she says. “I just had assumptions about him. He unnerved me a little bit, but he quickly became one of the people that most impressed me by his ability to look at photographs.

“It somehow opened his heart to start looking very carefully at things, and you can see that in the way he dissects that picture, which on the surface is pretty brutal.”

Ear hustling

When Poor suggested to some of the inmates that they produce a podcast together about life inside San Quentin, they nodded along at first, not letting on that they didn’t know what a podcast was.

She told them it was kind of like radio, only better. They could swear.

Eventually, Poor and a few of the inmates started producing “Ear Hustle,” a podcast named after the slang term for eavesdropping in prison. Poor co-hosts with Earlonne Woods, who is serving a 31-years-to-life sentence for attempted second-degree robbery.

The podcast explores themes like finding a cellmate or “cellie,” the unwritten laws of racial segregation and what it feels like missing out on things or to get old behind bars. Let’s just say it puts “Orange is the New Black” to shame and hit No. 1 on iTunes after being featured on the "Today" show.

"We are doing it because we love it, and the success is just like this beautiful, delicious icing," says Poor of the podcast, which at latest count had been downloaded 17.5 million times.

"I guess we can somewhat control the narrative," says Woods. "It's just interesting that people didn't really know about prisons or know what goes on inside prisons...I never thought that people didn't know about this. I didn't know that we basically were the first to really bring people inside on an audio level or on a reality level."

Cushy chairs and headphones have been set up in the MAM galleries, where visitors are welcome to binge episodes of "Ear Hustle." There is also a library of relevant books to sink into.

“The last time I was at a museum, I was probably in elementary (school),” says Woods, interviewed from San Quentin about what it means to have his podcast in a museum. “Knowing that our work is in a museum … hopefully it’s in there forever …. It means a lot. You will have a different variety of people that will get a chance to see something that we’re doing that probably never would have paid attention to it.”

One of the more memorable episodes features a man named Rauch (pronounced Roach), whose mother tried to drown him when he was a boy and who said his relationship with people has always been strained. While pets aren’t allowed at San Quentin, Rauch found a way to adopt small critters, like moths, frogs or swallows. For a while, he kept a pet black widow spider, feeding it bugs, bees and crickets. He’d let the insects free in his cell and watch the drama unfold.

“The bees would run around up in there, fly around in there for not long, and then they'd get caught in the web, and there she is, spray them with the webbing, and then wrap 'em up, and then eat 'em,” Rauch recounts. “It was action. It was theater, comedy. It was really good, better than watching TV.”

Like Nelson and Ramirez, Rauch has something relevant to say about the human powers of observation in our era of peak TV and Netflix.

Relevant in Milwaukee

It is no coincidence that The San Quentin Project is here, where high incarceration rates for Milwaukee and the state, especially for black men, have captured national headlines in recent years, says Lisa Sutcliffe, the photography curator at MAM who organized the show.

Here in Wisconsin, as elsewhere, public discussion often fastens on those statistics and the politics, Poor and Sutcliffe say, locking out the men and women who are locked up.

Prison reform has been central to a tight and contentious governor’s race here, for instance, with stark distinctions between Democrat Tony Evers, who supports a 50-percent reduction in the prison population, and GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s longtime tough-on-crime stance.

In conjunction with the show, MAM and the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University planned a three-day symposium for the Thursday, Friday and Saturday before the midterm election, bringing together national and local experts, artists, activists, prison officials and others to explore the role of the arts in criminal justice reform. Sutcliffe collaborated with Emilia Layden, a curator at the Haggerty, on the free and public event.

The fact that MAM and the Haggerty planned the symposium, including a day of artist-led community action, “gives credibility to the discussion in a way that it shouldn’t need – but that it does,” says Dasha Kelly Hamilton, of Still Waters Collective, who has been doing spoken word programs in Wisconsin prisons for about 13 years.

“We definitely need more arts programming,” says Julie Ashlock, who is coordinating the Second Chance Pell program for Milwaukee Area Technical College, a new program that allows incarcerated Americans to pursue post-secondary education.

This fall, Ashlock launched a new art class, conducted via computer. About 90 inmates in several prisons across the state signed up. One of the first exercises was a comparison of the portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery and made by artists Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald.

“Art is pretty low on the totem pole of what the Department of Corrections considers necessary,” says Ashlock, associate dean of liberal arts and sciences at MATC, who is also an artist.

Neil Thoreson, regional chief for community corrections in Milwaukee County, was involved in the planning of the symposium, and hopes that the public will come to learn about some of the volunteer-driven art programming that currently exists, including art therapy, which has proved beneficial to offenders with a history of trauma, he says.

Thoreson also notes that a visit by Poor to the Milwaukee Secure Detention Facility was one of the more notable byproducts of The San Quentin Project exhibit and the planning discussions for the symposium.

“The more she talked to them, the more they got into it,” said Ronald Malone, the warden at the detention facility, who said he is open to seeing more programming like Poor’s come into the facility.

Malone said there is a lot of untapped artistic talent in prisons, and that art gives the inmates “a sense of unity and a sense of purpose.”

“We have found that art is very therapeutic, and it brings a sense of calm to the inmates,” says Malone. “It is also an opportunity for them to interpret in their own manner and to express themselves.”

Poor sometimes spends 10 to 12 hours a day at San Quentin, working on the podcast and other projects. After she was brought into teach at San Quentin through the Prison University Project, she stopped working in a traditional way, alone in her studio, and went all in with a more socially engaged practice. She hopes in the near future to bring the voices of incarcerated women into her work and to get "Ear Hustle" heard in prisons across the U.S.

“The San Quentin Project: Nigel Poor and the Men of San Quentin State Prison” is on view at MAM through March 10. A related exhibit at the Haggerty, “Sable Elyse Smith: Ordinary Violence,” is on view through Jan. 27, 2019.

The Milwaukee Art Museum is making free tickets and group tours available to individuals who’ve been impacted by incarceration or who work with incarcerated individuals. To get a ticket or schedule a tour, call (414) 224-32000 or email community@mam.org.

Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic. Sign up to get weekly newsletter, Art City, here. Connect with her on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook or email her at mschumacher@journalsentinel.com.