Third Text

10 April 2025

Frances DeVuono

‘The Only Door I Can Open: Women Exposing Prison Through Art’, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), San Francisco, California, 1 February – 22 June 2025

‘The Only Door I Can Open: Women Exposing Prison Through Art’, partial installation view (a cell’s shower and toilet), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), San Francisco, 1 February – 22 June 2025, photo by Charlie Villyard, courtesy of YBCA

In the wake of the current frenetic changes challenging the United States at this moment, it could be easy for some to forget its singularly wrong approach to imprisonment. ‘The Only Door I Can Open, Women Exposing Prison Through Art’ is a reminder. It is a modestly sized exhibition, but large in its intent.

‘The Only Door…’ can’t exactly be described as relational art in the way that artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija or Félix González-Torres invited viewers to partake in their pieces. Neither is it quite social practice as we have come to think of it in works by, for example, the Los Angeles muralist Judy Baca. Nor is it the outright activism exhibited by the Guerrilla Girls – but if you think of all of those art movements together, you have something analogous.

Co-curated by Chantell-Jeanette Black and Tomiekia Johnson from within the walls of the country’s largest prison for women, the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF), ^[1] it is – in unequal measures – a teaching tool, a celebration of art and an opportunity to afford incarcerated artists a fair price for their labour. It is also another chilling indictment of the USA’s enormous prison population, its use of the death penalty, the unusual length of its sentencing, and the disproportionate number of Black and Brown people imprisoned.

‘The Only Door...’ opened on 31 January 2025, in one of the exhibition spaces at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), and that same night, in an alternate space and in conjunction with the exhibit, an aerial dance troupe called Flyaway Productions, performed ‘If I Give You My Sorrows’. Both the dancers and artists were asked to respond to the idea of their ‘bed as an antidote’. The performance was astonishing, both for the inventive and easy way women moved in and around platforms and beds suspended from what appeared to be a twenty-foot-high ceiling, but also for its music and the recitation of a poem written by Tomiekia Johnson, one of the curators of ‘The Only Door….’.

‘If I Give You My Sorrows’, dance performance by Flyaway Productions, with dancer Jhia Jackson, photo by R J Muna

All eight of the exhibiting artists in ‘The Only Door…’, as well as its two curators, are either currently incarcerated or formerly incarcerated. Upon entering the exhibition is Cedar Annenkovna’s eighteen-foot long acrylic painting titled Flight to Freedom. The artist spent six years in a Colorado prison before having her sentence overturned as a ‘wrongful conviction’, and, as her title suggests, the image of a woman flying free dominates the centre. It is dreamlike, but restive. The main figure is on a winged palette accompanied by a stack of books, coasting high above cities and forests in colours ranging from quinacridone pink, to orange, to purple. A small medallion-like insert shows another woman sitting in a cell, painted in blues. And beneath that, in muted, naturalistic colours is a man on a horse, hoisting a rifle as he looks down upon a field with small figures in the background.

Cedar Annenkovna, Flight To Freedom, 2025, acrylic on linen, exact dimensions unknown, photo by Charlie Villyard, courtesy of YBCA

Directly across from Annenkovna’s painting is a scale replica of the sixteen by eighteen-foot cell that typically houses eight women at the CCWF. With its dull, beige-painted lockers and bunk beds, the weight of institutionalisation can immediately be felt. The lockers, as narrow as those found in a gym, are left open. We can see each inmate’s private possessions, which vary only slightly with a meagre amount of clothes, sanitary pads, skin creams, ramen noodles, and/or instant coffee. In one locker, the curators created something akin to the ‘easter eggs’ found in video games, by swapping the label on a bottle of soap to the title of Angela Davis’s 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete?

In order to accommodate viewers’ ability to walk inside the cell’s small space, there are only two examples of the metal bunk beds actually installed at the YBCA. One is within the simulated installation, and another outside its perimeter. Instead, scale graphics are drawn on the floor to indicate where the other bunk beds would be, and concrete bricks indicate where the single toilet and shower are located. Partial doors are hung from the ceiling in front of those latter two spaces, so viewers can see that each have windows on both the top and bottom, precluding any chance of real privacy. This lack of privacy is clearly a dominating factor in daily life at CCWF.

A plaque describes a hierarchy within the beds. A sheet can be hung from the top rail, giving the lower berth more privacy, and so the lower bed is highly valued. We are told that the best bed is the lower tier of Bunk #3, because that one is placed against two walls. Bunks #1 and 2, near windows that give unrestricted visual access by the guards, or anyone else walking in the hallways, are less desirable. But viewers are informed that ‘the worst bed in all of prison [is the one] without a wall on either side and proximate to the bathroom and common area’, because that is where all the traffic is. The card ends by telling us ‘This bunk is what we call the freeway’.

‘The Only Door I Can Open: Women Exposing Prison Through Art’, installation view (with Bunk #3 in the corner), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), San Francisco, 1 February – 22 June 2025, photo by the author

The bed placed outside the demarcated space demonstrates how the hanging sheet provides some concealment. Painted on the fabric of this one is a poem, ‘Letter To My Bed’, by co-curator Chantell-Jeanette Black, where she observes ‘…at home I used to take prayer showers in peace now eyes pry on me through the open spaces in the shower wall. I can’t even piss in peace ’cus they see my face and feet through that door too.’

‘The Only Door I Can Open: Women Exposing Prison Through Art’, installation view with Chantell-Jeannette Black’s poem ‘Letter To My Bed’, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), San Francisco, 1 February – 22 June 2025, photo by Charlie Villyard, courtesy of YBCA

Interspersed inside and outside of the installation are fact sheets offering information – such as: ‘Between 2008 and 2016, women lifers [sentenced to life imprisonment] increased by 20%, compared to 15% increase for men.’ Racial disparities are also noted: ‘One out of every 39 Black women are sentenced to life [imprisonment] without parole, compared to one out of every 59 white women.’ It is worth putting this in context, as according to the 2023 US Census, White people constitute 75.3% of the population of the USA, whereas Black people only make up 13.7%. ^[2]

In addition to Annenkovna’s large painting, the perimeter is dotted with smaller drawings and paintings by the seven other artists. The number of participating artists (eight) matches the exact number of women assigned to a single occupied space at CCWF. That eight artists’ work is interspersed around this simulated cell for eight women – a room with metal lockers, bunk beds, a shower and a toilet with no real privacy – highlights the contradiction engendered between institutional utility and the very human desire for beauty in the face of that rigidity.

Joanna Nixon’s Blissful Bunk Freedom shows a woman lying flat on a winged bed, dressed in a red pantsuit and flying over an incredibly deep-cobalt-hued body of water, away from a prison rendered in grey and white. She uses that same technique of contrasting vivid colour against monochrome in Bunk Prayer Dream, in which a woman in full colour is on a motorbike following a fiery orange red road outside the confines of grey cement walls. Anna Ruiz’s three paintings, following her trajectory through the three dominant institutions of her life, do something similar, with a black and white image of a middle school, a chilling one of a figure in bed with grey and yellow from when she was at CCWF, and the final one in bright colours when she was a student at California State University.

Joanna Nixon, Blissful Bunk Freedom, 2024, photo by Charlie Villyard, courtesy of YBCA

A number of works focus on nature. Sarah Montoya, like Nixon, uses richly saturated colours, whereas Elizabeth Lonzano’s Muse is softer. The viewer’s gaze is directed from an opening in a brick wall to a tiny island surrounded by a sea that reaches the horizon. On the island is a single tower with a tiny figure in its top room eliciting contradictory feelings of hope and isolation at the same time.

Left:  Sarah Montoya, A Light Within, 2024, acrylic and glitter on canvas board, dimensions unknown; right:  Elizabeth Lozano, Muse, 2024, acrylic on canvas board, dimensions unknown, photo by Charlie Villyard, courtesy of YBCA

As the prompt given to the artists by the curators was ‘my bed as an antidote’, most responded visually with imagery of beds as a place of comfort or escape and dreams. But there were exceptions. My Relationship to my Bed Sucks!!!, by graphic artist Jennifer Rhodes, is a composite of geometric and organic shapes with a silhouetted figure and a prison door on the lower right. Words such as ‘depressing’, ‘anguish’, ‘turmoil’, float over its surface. Grace Ward’s The Idle Hour is a somewhat frightening reference to the fairytale about Beauty and the Beast, a watercolour with bits of glitter glued on its surface. Giovanna Zepeda creates an image that illuminates the installation viewers just experienced. In Holding on to My Humanity is a painting of a CCWF cell. Zepeda turns it into a place where occupants find both beauty and domesticity alongside fear and uncertainty. The bunkbeds are there, but the space is changed with richly coloured wallpaper and carpet. In the lower centre, we see the legs of a woman leisurely sketching on her bed. There is a mermaid on the floor. In another bunk lays a fantastic, winged and spotted female animal, while the bunk above her hosts a mummy.

Left:  Jennifer Rhodes, My Relationship with my Bed Sucks!!!, 2024, acrylic and markers on canvas board, dimensions unknown; right:  Giovanna Zepeda, Holding on to my Humanity, 2024, acrylic on canvas board, dimensions unknown, photo by Charlie Villyard, courtesy of YBCA

The United States has long been critiqued for both incarceration and sentencing injustices. Prominent activists such as Angela Davis and Ruth Gilmore have called for change, and the ‘prison abolition’ movement is growing. ^[3]  This latter term is a complex call that entails changes as wide ranging as access to education, alleviation of poverty and changes in sentencing, as well as a model that encourages restoration and actual rehabilitation. The current Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has declared an interest in changing California prisons from a punitive to a rehabilitative model based on what was being termed in the press as the ‘Scandinavian model’, ^[4] but so far results are small.

In 2017, a photography teacher, Nigel Poor, and two inmates in San Quentin prison at the time, Earlonne Woods and Antwan Williams, launched the podcast, Ear Hustle, to tell stories of life within the prison walls as well as what it is like to return to the outside. The podcast, widely acclaimed, was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Audio Recording in 2020. That same year, while at San Quentin, Rahsaan Thomas (a producer for Ear Hustle, as well as a writer and filmmaker) started Empowerment Avenue (EA) as a non-profit with Emily Nonko, a writer from New York. Paroled in 2023, Thomas is now the Director of EA.

‘The Only Door I Can Open, Women Exposing Prison Through Art’ had another, earlier iteration during the COVID lockdowns. Then, like now, it was a collaboration among EA and community arts groups such as Flyaway Productions, as well as the Museum of the African Diaspora. EA’s stated goal ‘is to normalize the inclusion of incarcerated writers and artists in mainstream venues by bridging the gap between them and harnessing this creative proximity as a path to de-carceration and public safety’. ^[5]  Its focus is on writers, visual artists and filmmakers, and, unlike other commercial galleries, it gives artists eighty per cent of all sales.

EA has produced and/ or collaborated with others to create a number of exhibitions in the last several years, creating pathways themselves, for themselves, and reaching out to others. ^[6]  While California’s Governor has stated that his goal is to create a model for rehabilitative justice in place of the broken systems that exist in the US, it looks like incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists and writers are actually doing the work.
 

^[1]    See ‘Facts About California Women’s Prisons’ on the California Coalition for Woman Prisoners site, as well as the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

^[2]    See the United States Census Bureau’s ‘Quick Facts’

^[3]    See Rachel Kushner, ‘Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind’, The New York Times Magazine, 17 April 2019; see also a March 2025 conference at Harvard University: ‘Week of Abolition – Abolitionist Justice: Alernative Responses to Harm’

^[4]    See Shervin Aazami and Emiliano Lopez, ‘California criminal justice system has a long way to go if Newsom wants to model Norway’, CalMatters, 28 April 2023, accessed 14 March 2024

^[5]    See Empowerment Avenue

^[6]    In the area of exhibitions alone, EA has been active, co-producing exhibits with galleries across the United States. Concurrent with this exhibition was ‘Painting Ourselves into Society’, at the Berkeley Art Center in Berkeley, California, curated by Orlando Smith and moving to the Manna Gallery in Oakland in March 2025; Alvin Smith’s solo exhibition, ‘The Underprivileged Oasis’, at the Muse Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 2024; ‘She Told Me Save the Flower’, a solo exhibition by Corey Devon Arthur in 2023 at My Gallery NYC in Brooklyn, NY; and others. See ‘Empowering Voices, One Exhibition at a Time’ on the EA website.

Frances DeVuono is an art writer, artist and former Associate Professor of Art at the University of Colorado Denver. She was a Contributing Editor for Artweek, and her reviews and articles have appeared in magazines such as Art in America, Arts, Art Papers, Sculpture Magazine and New Art Examiner, among others, as well as here in Third Text Online. She lives in Berkeley, California.