In 2003, artist Sherri Lynn explored personal feelings of confinement by volunteering at a women’s correctional facility in North Carolina. When her volunteer time concluded, she had set in place a tradition of caring which continues today.
Wood is an extraordinarily versatile bay area artist. Her social practice projects engage individuals in a variety of community settings. Her innovative workshops on quilting and sewing are a respite for the overworked creative soul.
I first met Wood in 2010 when she was exhibiting her Passage Quilts (http://www.passagequilts.com ) and Prayer Banner: REPENT / MERCY / GLORY in a gallery exhibition I helped to install entitled, The Art of Transformation at John F. Kennedy University.
Below is a photo collage from the ongoing series Repent/Mercy/Glory. Wood invites gallery goers and sewing groups to help create the artwork. 
During the Art of Transformation exhibition Wood delivered a public talk on her work and shared photos and audio clips of her projects: The Mantra Trailer, 1200 Hats, Prayer Banner, Passage Quilts, Tattoo Baby Dolls and Group Stitching Mantra.
Wood’s social practice artworks embrace people from many walks of life. Public participation provides the link between ideas and the resulting art forms, which for the most part are not predetermined. The act of sewing, crocheting, speaking and reciting becomes the channel whereby the terrain of the personal and communal is negotiated.
Mantra Trailer Sherri Lynn Wood
The majority of Wood’s projects employ textile arts to create a bridge for participants to tangle with hope, despair, grief and joy. There is a characteristic of compassion which consistently resonates throughout her work. Participants have a safe space, whether it be a stitching circle or a mantra trailer, where they are able to be heard and share deeply felt emotions, fears, hopes and desires. In a world where we are bombarded with messages on how to think, look, be and feel, Wood’s offering spaces are a sanctuary of freedom.
In keeping with the idea of this blog focusing upon art which intentionally builds community, I chose to dialogue with Sherri about her 1200 Hats project. Recently I had read several dismal statistics on incarceration rates and prison construction in the United States and 1200 Hats came to mind. I wanted to know more about the project. How did an artist offer an opportunity for incarcerated women to respond to the needs of another community of incarcerated women?
1200 Hats exhibition (2003), collaboration with residents at the
North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women.
What initially drew you to work with incarcerated women?
After my first year in the Bard MFA program I felt very confined. So I decided to volunteer at a woman’s prison for a year to get a better understanding of confinement from people who were living that reality.
It is intriguing you felt confined and decided to spend more time with that feeling and explored it in a deeper way. It says a lot about you as a person, about your courage to confront the uncomfortable. And then out of that exploration, this amazing project evolved which took you on a journey.
In so many of your projects you rely on the participation and responses of the people you are interacting with in order to achieve an end result. I suspect there must be some suspense from not knowing how people will respond. When you were working with the women involved in the 1200 Hats project, was there an instance when you were surprised by a participant’s response to your intended project?
I was surprised. After a few months of working with the women I thought we would create some abstract rendering in crochet on prison life, but when I asked the women what kind of installation they wanted to create with the yarn they said they wanted to make something useful like hats or blankets.
So 1200 Hats was a co-created idea between you and the women?
The project was definitely co-created, but the core idea came from the incarcerated women. We decided to make a hat for every woman in the prison, about 1200 at that time. One of the prison rules for volunteers was, if you were asked for anything by one of the residents, the answer was “NO” – unless you could give it to everyone. Like a stamp for example. When the women told me they wanted to make hats I thought if we created a hat for every woman we could distribute them to the entire prison population.
That was a great response to the prison rule. Many people would not have jumped into another project of finding yarn. What other kinds of challenges did you face?
The women were wonderful to work with. They welcomed me once they saw that I was making a long term weekly commitment to be with them in the prison. The biggest challenge was from the prison authority. I never asked permission to do an art project with the residents. I just started doing creative activities with them at first and the project began to grow. Eventually, after knitting a few hundred hats we (myself and the small staff that worked with the group of thirty-five women under their supervision), had to get permission from the warden to continue. I had to align the project to the political agenda of the warden and others in order to carry on. There was a lot of negotiation.
It just so happened at that time that a NC state senator was working with the warden on a prison reform initiative for non-violent women offenders with children under twelve, so that they could serve their time with their children in a special facility. I convinced the warden to move forward with a public exhibition of the hats as a way to focus awareness on this initiative. She agreed, but required that the project be open to all the prison residents, so that everyone could contribute to making hats, which was okay by me.
At one point there was a show down over the hats. I was sitting in a room with the warden and the senator and they asked who the hats belonged to. They wanted them to be auctioned for the prison reform initiative. They vetoed the idea of distributing the hats to the residents as talismans for hope and renewal, and threatened to shut down the project on the spot if I didn’t cooperate. It was hard letting go of my vision, but when I talked to the women about it they were eager to donate their hats in order to do something good for their community. They wanted to support their sisters in need through this new reform initiative.
Being given a choice of ‘our way or no more crocheting’ did not give you the option to NOT cooperate. That seems like a pivotal point in the project and ironically it brought even more exposure to the work. Amazingly you say the project has continued, so it is obvious you and the women made a great choice.
The big challenge with community based art is negotiating the institutional structures. I had to be willing to let go of my vision and willingly invite others to shape the project with me. At first it felt like a failure whenever my vision was thwarted, but later I realized that this was the beauty and success of the project.
The photos from the installation of the hats were very engaging and a testimony to the hard work and effort made by the women. Where was the exhibit installed and were the incarcerated women able to see it?
The exhibition was installed for over a month at the Durham Arts Council. The opening reception was huge. Over $8000 worth of yarn was donated from members of local churches and synagogues. Many people contributed yarn, crocheted hats, visited with me in the prison, and spent hours helping install the project. So many people were involved, and they brought all of their friends. The warden, senator, guards and staff from the prison attended. They brought about a dozen of the prison residents who actually worked on the project. The women were dressed like everyone else in fancy clothes suitable for an art opening, so nobody knew they were serving time. It was a very popular, well attended and effective installation. By the comments that were left, we could tell that lots of people on the outside, who viewed the exhibition, thought deeply about the ramification of so many incarcerated women, seeing them as mothers and human beings for the first time.
What an unexpected gift, to have an unintended consequence be a positive impact – in the decision to share 1200 Hats, incarcerated women were seen as whole people.
After the exhibition, the hats were auctioned to raise money for, Our Children’s Place. The residents of the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women continue to crochet hats to benefit Our Children’s Place, a facility for non-violent offenders, who happen to also be women with children. http://ourchildrensplace.com/pdfs/HATS.pdf
Do you know if an exchange of this sort, between prisoners, has been accomplished before your 1200 Hats Project?
Certainly not in the prison that I worked with. I wasn’t aware of any precedents in other prisons before I started although I’m sure there were some. I just jumped in because of my interest. Actually the project didn’t get much attention or feedback when I brought it back to art school. In 2003 “social practice” was not really a part of the definition of art at that time. The language and acceptance of “social practice” as art wasn’t fully incorporated into the art schools yet – especially in NY – maybe more so – on the west coast.
You were definitely tuned into the big antennae because there are MFA and MA programs in Social Practice, Social Sculpture and Community Practice springing up throughout the states and abroad. It is amusing that artists pride themselves on creativity, but when it comes to reinventing the forms and functions of art, the new definitions are often not readily welcomed. It seems many people have benefited from the fortitude you displayed to carry on with 1200 Hats in spite of some challenges. I am glad you had time to share the stories associated with the project. I have a much deeper understanding of the challenges and triumphs.
At the closing of the 1200 Hats, after the installation was down and before the hats were turned over for auction, Wood created a video as a personal response to the project. See the you tube video below:
To see more of Sherri Lynn Wood’s inspiring work please visit: http://www.daintytime.net
http://www.facebook.com/daintytime
Up and coming Sherri Wood is teaching a two week Improv Quilting workshop at Penland School of Craft in June 2011, geared toward educators, called Mapping the Rhythm of Attention. For more info: http://www.penland.org/classes/summer/summer_textiles.html
Sherri’s talks Improv:
“Improv is not random or off the cuff quilting. There is more to it than just grabbing pieces blindly and sewing them willy-nilly. It’s a practice of being present.”
Did you wonder why there were no photos of the incarcerated women? No photo taking was allowed in the prison. If you want to learn more about the criminal justice system in America today, below are few good reads:
Punishment and Inequality in America, by Bruce Western
Russell Sage Foundation
Orange Is The New Black, my year in a women’s prison, By Piper Kerman
Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy
by Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen
A good link:
Women’s Prison Association http://www.wpaonline.org/
