Across prison walls: Connection between U-M students, incarcerated artists withstands pandemic

The inability to enter prisons during the COVID-19 crisis challenged a group of University of Michigan students who wanted to keep supporting and working together with incarcerated artists.

With a lot of creativity and meticulous mailing logistics, U-M faculty, staff and students from different schools, all part of the Prison Creative Arts Project, remodeled the structure of their creative arts workshops for an online format and offered them in four areas: theater, creative writing, music and visual art.

About 260 incarcerated artists from 12 prisons throughout Michigan participated and have just successfully concluded their workshops. Thirty of them were part of the Out of the Blue choir, which also made a total shift in their programming to reach and interact with their confined audience.

“Instead of traveling to the prisons each week and giving the workshops, the teams worked to put together packets of information that got mailed into the prisons before the semester started,” said Ashley Lucas, associate professor of theatre & drama and the Residential College. “Since the pandemic prevented us from being able to offer in-person programming, we created this correspondence programming inspired by what we have historically done in person.”

Read the full article as it originally appeared in the Michigan News