Paint Me A Road Out Of Here

Bluesky

When Faith Ringgold visited the women’s house on Rikers island in 1971, commissioned to produce a painting for it, she asked the inmates what they wanted. One of them told her that the thing she most needed to see was a road out of there. The work subsequently developed went far beyond any literal interpretation of that. The route it depicted saw women becoming empowered in ways wholly unexpected at the time. It spoke to a much deeper-rooted problem, to the absence of freedom that led many of the women there to become incarcerated in the first place. It was an inspiration to many – and yet, in a strange turn of events, the painting itself would go on to become a prisoner.

Catherine Gund’s latest searing documentary tells the story of the painting and of Faith’s subsequent struggle to liberate it. Filmed during the last few months of the artist’s life, it also follows Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, a new artist commissioned to create something for the women of Rikers. In so doing it tracks the development of a fascinating relationship between the two women and explores their efforts, at different points in history, to challenge the perception of Black and otherwise marginalised women and gender-expansive people, to open up narratives around incarceration and search for a more positive way forward.

The idea of a world without prisons is alien to most people, and so difficult to broach – it tends to be met with knee-jerk reactions focused on a very small part of the prison population. This makes approaching it through art – or a documentary about an adjacent subject – an interesting choice, because it has the effect of working around those habitual patterns of thought, making it easier to ask questions and engage the imagination. “Art disrupts lazy thinking,” as we are advised here. As Gund’s camera explores the spaces of the prison and of the museums and galleries where we are more used to seeing art, the point is made that these are institutions which tell the public what to value and what to devalue. Who do we expect to encounter in each? How does that affect our understanding of wider society?

Mary has been a prisoner herself. Over the course of the film, elements of her story emerge: a rough childhood leading up to her mother’s schizophrenic break; being made a ward of the state; being diagnosed with that favourite ‘condition’ identified in children who have been repeatedly mistreated, oppositional defiant disorder. A messy, unsupported transition into adulthood followed, leading to her arrest when she was nine months pregnant and an awful experience of giving birth. She’s with her son now, but they have been through a lot, and she’s particularly focused on the mistreatment of Black children. This is one of the strands that leads her to a series of works responding to the photographs of the celebrated by deeply problematic Thomas Eakins. We follow her process, with her paintings eventually revealed over the closing credits.

It’s not only famous artists who get attention here. There is an exploration of the importance of art-making as a means through which ordinary prisoners can brighten up their world and lift their horizons. We see a cell in Philadelphia which a prisoner was given permission to paint. Pale pink and white, with affirmations daubed on the walls by her fellow inmates, it has a very different character from the austere remainder of the building, and it’s easy to understand how much of a psychological boost it must have provided.

Like all Gund’s work, this is dense and full of meaning. Examining Faith’s original creation, we are invited to identify the structural elements that give it power, and to recognise that the various professions in which its female characters are depicted were not available to women then. Its subsequent history, after falling into the hands of men, is very telling; and time is made to celebrate the valiant efforts of a female guard who refused to give up on it even after official sources claimed that it was lost. It is now worth millions of dollars, but its cultural value is far greater. Paint Me A Road Out Of Here celebrates the longstanding interconnection of art and activism, even as it too contributes to that revolutionary tide of ideas.