2024 Michigan Notable Author award winner, Janie Paul, “Making Art in Prison” - Coming to EVERYbody Reads on June 15 @ 5 p.m.

Making Art in Prison: Survival and Resistance by Janie Paul – Hat & Beard Press

In Making Art in Prison: Survival and Resistance, Janie Paul introduces readers to the culture and aesthetics of prison art communities, and shares heart-wrenching, poignant, and often surprisingly humorous artists’ narratives. These powerful stories and images upend the manufactured stereotypes of those living in prison, imparting a real human dimension—a critical step in the movement to end mass incarceration.

What is art? Beauty, communication, challenge? Sure. It can be all those things. But how about agency? How about dignity? How about staking a claim to one’s own humanity? In Making Art in Prison: Survival and Resistance, Janie Paul delves deep beyond the immediate visual impact of the artwork that has escaped prison cells onto the pages of her book to explore how art can demolish the prison walls of the soul.

-Sister Helen Prejean C.S.J., author of Dead Man Walking

Janie Paul is a painter, curator, and writer. She is the senior curator and co-founder, with her late husband Buzz Alexander, of the Exhibitions of Artists in Michigan Prisons, founded in 1996, a project of the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) at the University of Michigan. She is an Arthur F. Thurnau professor emerita of the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan where she has won many awards for her work bringing together college students with incarcerated people and children experiencing poverty.

The event is free and open to the public! PLEASE feel free to share

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