Every month, a collective of Seattle women meet to make art and share their experiences of having a partner or family member in jail or prison. Now, they're showing that artwork at King Street Station.
The exhibition, titled “Living and Loving Under the Carceral State,” includes drawings, paintings and interactive pieces such as a phone that plays a message family members hear when someone calls from jail.
The group is made up of women of color who are artists, attorneys and community organizers. Some say creating art together helps them break through isolation, tell their stories and cultivate their imaginations.
Artist Stef Marchand, an enrolled member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, drew people wearing Native regalia on official Washington Department of Corrections documents, which range from violations to release paperwork.
“I even used a log, just to show where they have to log every little piece of their property,” Marchand said.
It’s ledger art, which originated in the 1800s when Indigenous Plains people drew on discarded documents such as account books or banking paper. Marchand wants to draw attention to the disproportionate number of Native people in jail, which she said is another form of colonization.
“This is our resistance to this — I don’t even want to say second wave, because there’s been lots of waves — but it is a huge wave of colonization,” she said.
Marchand spent some time in jail, and her partner has been incarcerated as well. She said she hasn’t been vocal about that part of her life, so most people who follow her art don’t know that she advocates for reforming the justice system.
Marchand and another artist in the collective, Cassandra Butler, want to take away the judgement they feel when they share that information with another person.
“I want to bring a little humanity to this process, especially for women who are out here in these streets fighting to bring people home and fighting to keep people home once they are home," Butler said.
Martina Kartman is an attorney and co-founder of Collective Justice, an organization advocating for justice reforms. Kartman used photos of loved ones in jail for her collages, cutting out the pictures and placing them on “dreamy scapes.”
“It’s funny and sweet and silly, and I also firmly believe that when we can imagine something different, it does chart a path toward freedom,” she said.
Kartman said working to get loved ones out of prison has “crushed me and exhausted me, and left me with grief and longing.” The collective has become “a little sanctuary space for me to just create.”
“And honestly, art-making is so meditative,” Kartman said. “I just get to let go of some of that stuff and paint with my hands and have fun and be joyful and playful, and also tell really funny stories.”
Tlingit artist Allison Bremner, who helped organize the exhibition, said she’s "really excited about the work that they put out.”
The collective will host an event on Jan. 7 at King Street Station where participants can make cards for people who are currently in jail. The collective is also launching a zine that will explore what justice looks like from the perspective of incarcerated people, their families and survivors of violence.
The free exhibition is on display through Feb. 7.
