Escaping Time works to change the way people who have been through the criminal legal system are viewed by society as a whole. By exhibiting artwork created behind prison walls, we are able to engage visitors, bring attention to issues related to the carceral system, and remind people that there are human beings behind each piece, most of whom will one day reenter society. We must all have a vested interest in their successful reintegration and work toward the goal of prison abolition.

ESCAPING TIME,

A HISTORY 

by MARK THIVIERGE 

Sometime in 2013, at the time CFO of a NYC engineering firm, I visited an exhibit of Latin American art at the Museo del Barrio in Manhattan. That exhibit included a display of 8 or 10 pieces of Mexican prisoner art, called paños (from the Spanish pañuelo), which were drawn on the white handkerchiefs given to inmates. The medium was usually pen and ink, but often other available media like coffee and/or Kool-aid were used. 

The quality of these works was memorable, and given their source, remarkable. 

Within very little time, I located on the Internet an organization in Washington, DC, founded by a formerly incarcerated musician, that had amassed a collection of several thousand pieces of art, all created within prisons in the United States. While traveling to DC for work, I visited the founder and viewed the collection….more impressive by far than the paños, and of enormous variety in subject matter, style, and materials. This was seriously compelling work. 

The DC group was showing and selling these works in small venues around greater Washington, but had no representation in NYC. As a New Yorker and art lover approaching retirement, with a serious liberal social bias birthed during the Vietnam era, I had clearly found my calling. 

Commercial art galleries of course had no interest in displaying inexpensive work for which they would receive minimal income, and the cost of renting space was prohibitive, even in the outer boroughs. After a year and a half, on visiting Governors Island for its annual Art Fair in Sept ‘14, I realized that I had found our venue.

Since our first ESCAPING TIME exhibit in 2015, we have developed our own relationships with incarcerated artists, and our mission has expanded from one of educating viewers about the incarcerated population, to advocating for change in both our judicial and penal systems. We are nonprofit (serious understatement) and contribute 50% of sales proceeds to the artists or their designees. Our staff of volunteers is a mix of formerly incarcerated artists, others with associations to incarcerated artists, like the fiancée of one artist, the mother of another, and community volunteers. Proceeds retained are applied to expenses incurred. Jay Darden (Curator) and I manage the effort on a volunteer basis.