“Inside Out” Art Exhibit Travels From Wheeling to Charleston, Lewisburg
Visitors to the Mother Jones Center for Resilient Community’s Bill Hogan Gallery this summer were treated to an exhibition of some of our region’s most engaging and socially engaged art. The show, Inside Out, is comprised of work from artists who are currently incarcerated at state prisons in West Virginia.
The exhibit opened April of 2022 and has been seen by hundreds of visitors over the last six months. Featuring work from inmates in Huttonsville Correctional Center and the Mount Olive Correction Campus and Work Camp among other institutions, much of the work is deeply involved with questions of social justice, and equity.
“Idle,” an inmate present incarcerated at Mount Olive, is one of the best represented and most prolific artists in the show. His affecting piece, Sold, featuring the image of child alone and crumbled on a city street but surrounded by a weighty and thick gold frame, forces viewer to confront the disconnect between the wealth that flows through the art market and the deep poverty and lack of support that are a daily reality for millions of children in the United States.
In one of his strongest pieces, “Idle” wears his influences on his sleeve. Tower Swing, brings viewers Banksy-style silhouette of a guard tower cum amusement park ride upon which inmates are suspended and fly through the air as if on Kennywood’s Swing Around. The playfulness of the image is held in check not only by the starkness of the guard tower, but by the harshness of the artist’s materials. Printed on a section of a plywood pallet from the prison, Tower Swing makes a complex and devastating statement about the Merry-Go-Round aspect of the justice system as currently practiced. Reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s statement “I couldn’t help but feel ashamed to live in a land where justice is a game,” the piece speaks truth to power in a devastating way.
Another artist involved with the show is Ryan Ewing, a thirty-two year old Parkersburg native. Drug addiction led to Ewing spending eighteen months in the Huttonsville Correctional Center. While incarcerated, Ewing’s artistic ability provided him with the ability to connect with other inmates in a positive way.
“I knew after high school that I wanted a career in the arts and enrolled in the Art Institute of Pittsburgh,” Ewing said. “When I was in prison, art functioned as a survival tool. Artists are beloved and respected in prison.”
Ewing described letting others know about his artistic talents by working on a half-finished picture in public. “Everyone could see that I could draw, and art in prison is a necessity,” he said.
By creating artwork for an array of inmates, often for tattoos or envelopes containing letters to loved ones, Ewing was able to stay on the good side of violent prison gangs as well pay for the daily necessities of life through the commissary privileges of those for whom he created art.
“In prison,” Ewing says, “I was able to get lost in my artwork; it really helped the days pass.”
Out of Huttonsville for almost two years, Ryan Ewing has been up to much good. He not only has been a force at the Mother Jones Center for Resilient Community, he was also in charge of doing the installation work for the Inside Out show both at the Bill Hogan Gallery and in Charleston. Ewing recently became enrolled in Goddard College’s B.F.A. program. Ewing also plans to open a reentry home in Wheeling.
“By [opening the reentry home], I get to help people, and it also enables me to help the MoJo,” he said.
The traveling exhibition features work from more than twenty artists. The show was exhibited in Charleston, and selected works made their way in September to the Healing Appalachia conference in Lewisburg, West Virginia.
