What is Freehand Arts Project?
Freehand Arts Project is a group of volunteers committed to bringing the creative arts to individuals incarcerated in Texas prisons. Our program strives to address the deep wounds found in the incarceration system by providing a safe avenue for self-reflection, the opportunity to develop emotional awareness, and a supportive community. Our classes give individuals who are incarcerated an experience of authorship and introspection through creativity, allowing them to engage in the world more confidently and authentically.
Freehand’s Mission
To center the voices of individuals who are and have been incarcerated. To honor these individuals and their stories with dignity. To use art as a platform to advocate for healing and equity.
Achieving Our Mission
We carve out spaces to make silenced voices heard. We believe that art allows individuals to harness their own power to tell others what they’re thinking or how they’re feeling — a power that many individuals incarcerated may have never really had, and rarely experience in jail. We believes in the dignity of our students and that their stories are worth telling, and work with others who share our mission to provide programming inside the county jail, events on the outside, and share our students’ work.
Freehand’s Background and the Landscape of the Carceral State
Founded in 2009 by Benet Magnuson as the PRISMS program, our project employs highly-qualified volunteers to teach weekly creative arts classes in Austin’s county jail. Our program has inspired hundreds of inmates and officers, who have created anthologies, a jailhouse newsletter, and creative writing contests.
The United States locks people in prison at a higher rate than any other nation in the history of the world. It is one of the most daunting systemic problems we face, an issue of deep social inequality that harms inmates, families, and communities. Since the 1970s, the U.S. has spent billions to build a mass incarceration system with staggering incarceration rates. Over the past decades, the population of incarcerated individuals in the U.S. has increased from 300,000 to over two million.
Freehand’s Philosophy
Freehand’s classes offer individuals opportunities to draw, paint, read, and write as a way to heal from the realities of incarceration — from pain incurred by separation from their families and destruction of their communities. Art rests at the intersection of introspection, identity, craft, community-building, and communication – giving it a transformative power to tackle the paradoxical complexities of the carceral state:
How do we make sense of a national practice of caging individuals in a country founded on freedom?
How can we unravel concepts of humanity and criminality?
How do we reckon with the “inside” and “outside” world?
Writing and art-making provide a space for individuals to work hard to produce something they can be proud of. Our classes build technical skills and work ethic. They ask individuals to write, re-write, and consider their own stories. They value collaboration and vulnerability. Whether individuals are working on a collective piece or are sharing their work with others, in our classes we build skills and create spaces that center on a restorative vision of justice in our world.