COLUMN: Art in its Own Terms #1, "How Some People Do Time"
Dmitry Samarov on "Into the Hourglass," an exhibition of work by incarcerated artists at Chicago's National Museum of Mexican Art
March 14—August 10, 2025
National Museum of Mexican Art
Chicago, Illinois
Quilts warm beds, tattoos commemorate mile markers, scrimshaw immortalizes sea voyages, but what does a painting on a white wall do? What is it for? When artwork made out of desperation or need crosses over into the rarified air of the academy, some of its immediacy and inevitability is lost, but when the images are urgent enough, they will not be denied. A crucial difference between folk art and the gallery/museum kind is that the former comes from a community where it has a place and serves a purpose, whereas the latter is often created to exist in an aesthetic non-place for intangible reasons. Art often has no obvious purpose, but a handkerchief covered with an elaborate scene from its incarcerated maker’s life has context and gravity. A traveling exhibition of paño art at the National Museum of Mexican Art in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago puts the tension between two very different kinds of institutions front and center.
Culled from a collection of some three hundred drawings, paintings, and sculptures assembled by community advocate Rudy Padilla (1951-2006), the show presents images of prison life, love, religion, violence, pop culture, and family, on a variety of surfaces in as many different styles. Some of the most striking work was done by the least trained hands. As is so often the case, no matter the medium, technical skill is rarely a guarantee of compelling expression. The need to communicate will override decades of training. When you truly have something to say, it shows.
Constraints are not a limitation for the true artist, but the circumscribed conditions that created this work make many of the results a wonder. Drawn in pencil or ballpoint on handkerchiefs, sheets, or pillowcases by inmates, the intensity of confinement and the stretching to make do with the meager means available radiate like a smell from the gallery walls. This is not just a pastime but a way to make the hours and years not vanish unremarked upon.
I couldn’t help thinking of “Institutionalized” by Suicidal Tendencies looking at a kerchief depicting a man tying colors to the head of a boy holding a cup of Pepsi. That song is about a different kind of carceral facility but the feeling of being locked away and not understood or accepted is similar. I’ve never been locked up or been initiated into a gang, but this image of a ritual that so many have been part of reads the same way any good religious picture does. The crudeness of the execution only adds to the impact.
A portrait of a young woman done in ink on what appears to be a doily, with floral decorations as a frame, is a tribute to someone who has passed. It reminded me of the memorial t-shirts sold on the street in some Chicago neighborhoods. It is a way to immortalize loved ones gone too soon.
I imagine the people who made this work sitting for the hours, days, or months it took to complete it, feeling a purpose or direction that the rest of the time they’re doing might lack. The thing that art does for the one making it—on either side of the bars—is give shape and meaning to what is otherwise amorphous and random. It can also make time vanish, which, in the case of the artists featured in this show, has to be a primary goal.
Some of the most intricate and elaborate pieces remind me of painters like Joe Coleman or Ivan Albright. There is no physical space depicted in their pictures, rather, it is a kind of velvet quilt phantasmagoria. Naked women, monsters, chains, fire, signs, and symbols swirl together in a nightmarish mire. Every square centimeter is marked in some way, with no stopping to catch a breath anywhere within the frame.
The wide range of skill on display kept hitting me. In a traditional gallery or museum show, a lack of drawing ability will usually make me pass by quickly, but in this case, some of the pieces that affected me the most were in some ways the least accomplished. The elemental need to make a mark on a surface to purge an experience or memory overcame any technical flaw.
Not unlike early votive art—which a lot of this work resembles—many pieces are from anonymous artists. There was a time in European art when the artist’s personality and identity were not even a factor. A fresco or icon in a church was made to serve its community rather than aggrandize an individual. As Christianity’s stranglehold on painting and sculpture ebbed, the cult of personality around painters and sculptors grew. By the time of a megalomaniacal monster like Picasso, the work itself played second-banana to celebrity. Whatever bits of biography are included in the wall texts of this exhibition fade quickly from consciousness while looking at the work. It’s a restoration of a hierarchy that’s long been lost in the commercial and institutional art worlds.
There are many pop culture references throughout but they serve their own particular ends. Pinocchios, Mickeys, and Garfields abound but they’re not exactly the characters you know. A portrait of Wolverine in a sparse cemetery with a moody skyline behind him doesn’t make me think of the MCU. He makes me think of a man behind bars looking back on what may have gotten him there, dreaming of being somewhere else.
