Biography

I started drawing when I was very young and have never stopped. Drawing is at the core of my life as an artist. When I was a child, I studied clay sculpture at the deCordova Museum with Harris Baron, a delightfully playful and serious artist. As well as paying individual attention to each of our efforts, he periodically broke into a verbal stream of consciousness which showed us the value of seemingly scattered, curious and serious thoughts. This was an early lesson about the imaginative mind. At that long table of children bending over clay fantasies, I experienced the strong and as yet unarticulated connection between form and meaning. Throughout childhood and adolescence, I also loved reading and thinking. This led me to Bryn Mawr College where I intended to study philosophy; but I missed making art and finished college at Bennington College with a BA in painting.  Painter Pat Adams and sculptor Isaac Witkin, both profound thinkers, were mentors who helped define my artistic path. In New York City, I taught children at the Brooklyn Museum, one of the first to bridge the museum and its surrounding neighborhood with free community programs; and adults at Parsons School of Design. Teaching in these two disparate environments was a good way to research how people learn visual art processes and I went on to earn a Ph.D. in Art Education at New York University where I focused on perceptual development and artistic growth in the world of children.

I began my creative practice as a landscape painter, having grown up amidst a forest and on a river – a place I hold within me as a touchstone. I was drawn to light, a sense of place, and the magic of connecting viscerally to the immediate natural world. After starting to work with incarcerated artists, my own creative practice became influenced by them – by the intensity that comes from urgency and need, the authenticity, the inventive use of simple materials, and the long span of time spent on creating works. When I began making nonrepresentational work, I retained a focus on gesture, light and a sense of place from the landscapes I had done. I still think of these as landscapes, but internal ones.

Along with my continuing studio practice, teaching came to be central to my life and in 1995, I moved to Ann Arbor to teach at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design. (Now the Stamps School of Art & Design.) I joined Buzz Alexander, my life partner, and founder of the Prison Creative Arts Project in an effort to educate members of our university community and beyond about the crisis of incarceration in our country and to stand in solidarity with people living in prison. I began facilitating a series of visual art workshops for incarcerated people and was soon bringing students into prisons to do the same. In 1996, Buzz and I curated the first Exhibition of Art by Artists in Prisons. (Then called the Exhibitions of Art by Michigan Prisoners.) These exhibits have grown exponentially and are now embedded in the art culture of Michigan state prisons, and in Ann Arbor and throughout Michigan. Using a similar model as my Art Workshops in Prisons class, I initiated the Detroit Connections class at the Stamps School of Art & Design in 2000, which brings undergraduate students into Detroit public schools without art classes to make art with elementary school children. In recognition of these initiatives, I have received many university awards including the Harold R. Johnson Diversity award and an Arthur F. Thurnau professorship. In writing Making Art in Prison: Survival and Resistance, I drew upon my knowledge as a practicing artist, a teacher, and a curator and in doing so, became a writer. I continue my practice of drawing and painting.