Prison art is art that is created by persons who are imprisoned. Prison art is unique in several ways. Due to the low social status of prisoners, art made by prisoners has not historically been well-respected. The art, much like the prisoners themselves, is often subject to controls. Art made by prisoners is sometimes valued, or conversely sometimes sought to be actively destroyed. Prisoners often lack common art supplies, and have been known to fashion supplies from materials at hand such as

candy Candy, alternatively called sweets or lollies, is a Confectionery, confection that features sugar as a principal ingredient. The category, also called ''sugar confectionery'', encompasses any sweet confection, including chocolate, chewing gum ...

instant coffee Instant coffee is a beverage derived from brewed coffee beans that enables people to quickly prepare hot coffee by adding hot water or milk to coffee solids in powdered or crystallized form and stirring. The product was first invented in Inver ...

Examples of prison art

File:Deformity-Bassel-6-17-15.jpg, Painting by

Bassel Khartabil Bassel Khartabil (; 22 May 1981 – 3 October 2015), also known as Bassel Safadi (), was a Palestinian-Syrian open-source software developer. He was detained without trial by the Syrian government in 2012 and was secretly executed in 2015. Hu ...

June 17, 2015, Damascus Central Jail "An attempt to draw a stereotype. This is the stereotype I have in mind for the deformed souls, I have to deal with every day at jail. There are a lot of them." File:Incarceration Nation.jpg, ''Incarceration Nation'', 2017, by Donald "C-Note" Hooker File:POW wall art 2 (27206746770).jpg, Pencil drawing from a German

Prisoner of war A prisoner of war (POW) is a person held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610. Belligerents hold prisoners of war for a ...

on a wall in Camp Beale,

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. File:Ferris Wheel, toothpick art made by a San Quentin prison inmate - Musée Mécanique - San Francisco, CA - DSC02937.JPG, Ferris Wheel, toothpick art made by a

San Quentin prison San Quentin Rehabilitation Center (SQ), formerly known as San Quentin State Prison, is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated place of San Quentin in ...

inmate,

Musée Mécanique The Musée Mécanique (, "Mechanical Museum") is a for-profit interactive museum of 20th-century penny arcade games and artifacts, located at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, California. With over 300 mechanical machines, it is one of the w ...

, San Francisco California File:BirkenauPaintings2.jpg, Paintings created by child prisoners on the wall of the prison building in

Auschwitz II Birkenau Auschwitz, or Oświęcim, was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz ...

. Image depicts a school. File:A Pomeranian Prison Camp, 1941 Art.IWMARTLD1935.jpg, A Pomeranian Prison Camp, 1941 Louis Mitelle. A view down a gangway in a hut in a POW camp. Dejected prisoners in military uniform sit on the bunks which are three levels high and laundry hangs from the beams above. On the floor a group of prisoners sit huddled together in a group.

References

Visual arts genres {{prison-stub

Examples of prison art

See also

References