PCAP Programming: how we support our communities
Prior to the pandemic, PCAP sent groups of volunteers to facilitate creative arts workshops in youth and adult facilities and in public housing communities in Ann Arbor and Detroit. PCAP offers both one-day workshops in prisons distant from Ann Arbor and weekly arts workshops in facilities in Southeast Michigan. We offer workshops in theatre, creative writing, visual art, and music. These workshops facilitate creative expression in prisons and bridge the divides between those of us who do not live in confinement and those who do. Additionally, PCAP hosts a concert series featuring music groups from the University of Michigan’s prestigious School of Music, Theatre, and Dance. These groups perform inside prisons and youth facilities, engage audiences in interactive music exercises, and sometimes hold a jam session with incarcerated musicians. Our main objective in all of our programming in prison is always to build community through artistic engagement, collaboration, and creativity.
Each year PCAP hosts the world’s largest curated exhibition of prisoner art. The 25th Annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners was postponed because of the pandemic, but for the last quarter of a century, PCAP has curated and exhibited hundreds of high-quality works of art by incarcerated artists. Every year PCAP’s professional curator team visits each prison in the state to meet with artists, offer them artistic feedback and critique, and select the best of their work for the annual exhibition. Thousands of people see the exhibition when it is mounted for two weeks on the University of Michigan campus and most artwork is sold at prices named by the artists. All sales proceeds go directly to the artists themselves. We launched an online preview of the show in March 2020 due to the pandemic-related postponement and to increase accessibility for people who cannot travel to the exhibit in Ann Arbor. Here’s a short video of the 24th Annual Exhibition. Here you can listen to a podcast interview with Martín Vargas and Bryan Picken, two formerly incarcerated artists, talking about what the PCAP exhibition means to them.
PCAP’s literary journal, The Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing, publishes poetry, prose, and essays by writers currently incarcerated in Michigan. An editorial committee of faculty, students, formerly incarcerated writers, and community volunteers receives hundreds of submissions from over 250 writers in the mail each year and gives meaningful feedback to every person who submits, even if their work is not selected for publication. In March 2020, PCAP published Songs Unsung: Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing, Vol. 12.
PCAP’s programming for formerly incarcerated people, called the Linkage Project, includes a podcast called While We Were Away. In each episode, a different narrator describes their journey home from prison, what they have learned in making that transition, and what they missed while they were away. The podcast is a clearinghouse for resources as well as a source of compassion and connection for newly freed people. It showcases the experience, strength, and hope of people who have already begun navigating their freedom with the goal that it may guide returning citizens to employment opportunities, housing, advocacy, education and a broader community that is integral for those newly home from prison.
In the six summers prior to the pandemic, PCAP faculty and students traveled to Brazil to partner with social justice theatre programs at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and the Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina. For three weeks each May and June, Michigan faculty and students participated in theatre programming in prisons, hospitals, and favelas (struggling neighborhoods) and taught PCAP’s theatre methodologies. Brazilian faculty and students from both universities also visit Michigan and offer theatre programming in the Michigan prisons. This exchange helps us to find solidarity in the human rights struggles around incarceration across languages, national boundaries, and political ideologies. For news stories and videos on the PCAP Brazil Exchange Program, see: https://global.umich.edu/newsroom/escaping-with-theater/
