A Wall in Process

This wall-in-process represents a snapshot into the year long collaborative project Humanize the Numbers at the University of Michigan. Led by Virginia artist and prison reform activist Mark Strandquist, this campus-wide endeavor aims to link together community partners—prison reformers and advocates, faculty, staff, students, artists, the incarcerated, and their families—in various artistic outputs to foster knowledge and to reveal the human face of the Michigan prison system.

What will emerge on this wall over the course of its eight week duration is the product of partnerships between the Institute for the Humanities and artists and prison reform activists. We have collected material from the Prison Creative Arts Program (PCAP), the Citizens’ Alliance on Prisons and Public Spending (CAPPS), Ana Fernandez’s undergraduate printmaking course in the Residential College, Natalie Holbrook from the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the AFSC’s Good Neighbor Letter Writing Project as facilitated by Ron Simpson-Bey, and a quilting workshop in a Michigan girls’ treatment unit facilitated by Theadra Fleming and Heather Martin.

This wall is not static, fixed, or ever meant to be complete. Its appearance will change week by week, both in an additive and reductive sense. The room will also serve as a meeting place for lectures and workshops by Humanize the Numbers partners throughout the exhibit’s duration. Displaying both the seemingly mundane and the extraordinary, the wall aims to engage viewers and garner interest in the pursuit of knowledge on Michigan’s prison system, acting as a humanistic lens into the lives affected by our prison system on a personal, institutional, statewide, and nationwide scope.