The Art of Interrupted Lives

When you leave the new show at the Chapel Art Center at St. Anselm College, you may find yourself looking at things differently for a while.
Magazines, purses, babystrollers, and diaper bags, all take on new meaning.
Those are just some of the banned items listed on an eight-foot long art installation called The Rule Wall, created by San Francisco artist Sasha Harris-Cronin.
Sara Dustin, a writer from Hopkinton, had been studying the piece.
Dustin: Among the rules are "no affection." You can read the fine print -- it says that children under the age of three may be allowed to sit in the prisoner's lap, but, after that, there's no touching?"
Written on the Rule Wall's metal frame is the warning that breaking the rules is to invite restrictions on future visits.
Solinger: So the point is how can you possibly learn all these things?
Rickie Solinger is the show's curator and director of WakeUp/Arts in New York.
Sollinger: How can you possibly memorize that which is irrational -- that you can't hug your child or have your child that's three years and one day sit on your lap. What kind of sense does that make? How does that promote the possibility of maintaining a good relation with your family, which we know will promote a more successful outcome when you're released?
This show raises questions about the criminal justice system and possible reforms...
But mostly it gives voice to the women taken out of society, and to their children who live in our neighborhoods.
These women speak most directly through "Centerpiece."
It’s a collection of more than 700 four-by-six cards from prisoners across the country.
Many of the cards, which are arranged on panels, include drawings.
Some are childlike -- painstakingly drawn flowers and teddy bears.
"My credibility is shot with my children," writes one woman.
"Free within," says another.
Everywhere, it seems, inmates have drawn images of eyes -- watching, being watched.
Curator Rickie Solinger.
Solinger: We received thousands of cards and it was very painful and difficult to choose the ones to put into the exhibition, but we looked for this visual vibrancy and you can see as you look around that they refer so frequently to the sadness, the sorrow, the missing of children, the sense of shame, the sense of disappointment, of frustration about being inside.
A group of Ohio teenagers, includingsome with friends or family in prison created the installation called "Inside/Outside".
It’s a series of paintings on connected wooden frames.
They’re arranged in two rows, facing each other, creating a corridor .
Solinger: As you stand at the top of the corridor, it's sort of a brilliant way of imagining looking down a cell block and all of these women in various degrees of agony and alienation and isolation and being incarcerated. And as you walk around the outside of the corridor, you see the images of children on the outside, feeling bereft, desperate for their mothers, abandoned.
For many at the opening, this was the most potent piece.
Maybe because it’s the work of children.
Or maybe because of the images.
Voices: 1) We see a child in shackles (child in shacklesVOX)...2) This image is extremely strong, for it's saying the child, too, may well suffer the same fate as the mother (samefateVOX). 3) Our eyes meet and you can see her tears and she's behind bars..she looks like a caged animal (eyesmeetVOX). 4) This piece of a mother giving birth chained to a bed and the chains sort of attached to the image itself is clearly distrubing but it's very moving (givingbirthVOX). 5) This one I've been staring at for five minutes, a child holding the ball and chain of their mother and just struggling to get by. It's a really eye-opening thing. You don't really think about children whose mothers are in jail.
Megan Dyer was there with her toddler daughter.
Dyer, an artist from New York City, is in New Hampshire working at the Currier Museum of Art.
Dyer: It's been a tough show in a way to see because I'm a new mother, and I can't imagine what these people go through -- the mothers and the children, being separated.
She was especially mved by the oversized photo hanging at the back of the gallery
It’s part of an installation called "Stretched Thin: Irishtine and her Mother," by photographer Stephen Shames.
The mother's hands frame the little girl's face.
It is the lightest of touches. But the girl is troubled.
Dyer: The central image is really intense with the mother kissing the daughter, probably goodbye, and you just see that's going to be a really angry kid that society will have to contend with, because that's sort of how we're leaving things.
In an adjoining exhibit hang some intriguing paintings by inmates from the New Hampshire women’s prison.
In her "Spirit Guide" paintings, Wendy DeCesare surrounds white, featureless figures with quick strokes of black, creating a tunnel effect.
Maeve Bacon, a senior at St Anselm helped out in the prison art class and got to know the women.
She watched as DeCesare discovered herself and found her own style.
Bacon: She was like sunsets, she was like a people pleaser, she wanted to do things that she thought you would like and she was really really nitpicky with details and making sure it looked good and then one day she came in and did this piece -- there was no color, nothing like that. She said it was her spirit guide. It was like a little breakthrough within the prison system. It was really fascinating to see what light they have within them, considering how bleak their lives are, currently.
If the show is about barriers -- the gulf between mother and child, the inmate and society -- it is also about erasing those barriers through art.
A painting called "Terror" by New Hampshire inmateJoveta Wyman has a swath of blue with three circular shapes hovering behind vertical lines.
but the lines appear to be disintegrating, suggesting the beginnings of freedom.
Father Iain MacLellan is director of the Chapel Art Center.
MacLellan: There's something she's feeling in that, I sense. If I didn't know the artist I'd say this artist feels something rising, something transcendent.
The exhibit Interrupted Life is scheduled to stay at St. Anselm’s Chapel Art Center through February 21st.
For NHPR News, I’m Ellen Grimm.