Guy Woodward, We the People

Guy Woodard We the People

Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project

Howl! Happening takes its name from the unpredictable, freeform happenings of the 60s and 70s, where active participation of the audience blurred the boundary between the art and the viewer. More to be experienced than described, Howl! Happening will curate exhibitions and stage live events that combine elements of art, poetry, music, dance, vaudeville, and theater—a cultural stew that defies easy definition.

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The history and contemporary culture of the East Village are still being written. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, immigrants, fashion, and nightlife are even more relevant now.

While gentrification continues apace and money is king, Howl!

Happening declares itself a spontaneous autonomous zone: a place where people simultaneously experience and become the work of art. As Alan Kaprow, the “father” of the happening, said: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.”

Guy Woodard We the People Published on the occasion of the exhibition June 19–July 21, 2019 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 32

We the People, 2002 Ballpoint pen on paper 27› x 20fl x 1‹ inches

Art in Prison Nicole R. Fleetwood, Professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University, in conversation with Howl

Does artmaking in prison fit into a larger discussion of contemporary art practice?

Nicole R. Fleetwood: Yes, it is crucial to think about the relationship between art made in prison and art that largely circulates in the commercial art world, galleries, nonprofit art centers, and museums. I think this is an important time for us to think both broadly and rigorously about the impact of mass incarceration and punitive governance on art and culture. For this reason, in my research I engage with art made in prisons, works made by non-incarcerated artists, and artistic collaborations between prison populations and non-incarcerated people. I think it reinforces the violence and inequality of the carceral state to pigeonhole or categorize the aesthetic practices and art of incarcerated people as something entirely separate and apart from contemporary art practices. Of course, this art made by incarcerated people is created under very different conditions than say works in art schools, studios, and foundations, but they are all part of a larger landscape of contemporary art and aesthetics.

Is art made in prison aided in a way that work in the studio does not provide?

N: There are prisons that have art studios. The conditions for making art in prison vary widely from prison to prison, and have lots to do with security levels of prisons and incarcerated people and the mandate and ideologies of the prison warden, administrators, and guards.

With so many restrictions on what people can have inside the prison, what are some of the materials that prisoners use to make art on the inside?

N: This is the greatest challenge and opportunity for most incarcerated visual artists: material constraints. Because artists often have limited access to materials, they are incredibly inventive, experimental, deliberative, and risk-taking in their works. In some

prisons, artists can order supplies from designated suppliers. Some can also get materials through established art programs or hobby rooms. There are facilities where friends, allies, and loved ones can also order art materials to be sent to incarcerated people. But most often, imprisoned artists forge materials, mix colors and paints, create surfaces, and find ways of fashioning art tools to make work.

In what ways does Guy Woodard’s work give voice to the kind of art made in prisons?

N: Guy Woodard’s art is an incredible example of the type of deliberation, care, and time that many incarcerated artists spend on their craft. Much of the work made in prisons consists of labor-intensive, time-consuming projects that are also conceptual in how artists cultivate their art practice in relationship to punitive institutions. Woodward’s intricate pointillist works exemplify how the space of punitive captivity can be transformed into an art workshop and how conceptualism, temporality, and material constraints are interwoven in prison art.

How does access to artistic production impact the quality of life of incarcerated individuals?

N: My larger project looks at prison art broadly. I consider art made in courses taught by outside teachers, art made among incarcerated peers, and also works made in clandestine ways that incorporate contraband items and unauthorized practices. So while I look at art made in established programs, I am more interested in how incarcerated artists experiment and improvise in ways that push up against and through the conditions of their captivity. I am interested in how incarcerated artists explore notions of un/freedom through their aesthetic practices.

Does artmaking assist incarcerated individuals who identify as artists in having additional currency inside the prison?

N: Yes. In many prisons, art has a special reverence, and artists

occupy a protected category. This is especially so among portrait artists. Portraiture is one the most common genres of art made in prisons. Often, incarcerated people will commission artists to draw or paint portraits of their loved ones.

Have there been examples of artists coming out of prison to transition into the art world after their release?

N: Yes. There are many wonderful examples of artists who have made the transition from prison to the larger art world. Artists like Russell Craig, Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Jesse Krimes, the late Inez Nathaniel Walker, and George Anthony Morton have received considerable attention, among others. In the contemporary literary world, there are writers like Reginald Dwayne Betts, Joseph Rodriguez, Piper Kerman, and Mitchell S. Jackson. But of course there is a more well-known tradition of prison literature that includes writers and thinkers like Oscar Wilde, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Etheridge Knight, and others.

Are there common themes from art made in prisons?

N: There are overlapping themes that arise in work made by people in captivity. Many are using modes of creative expression to tell people inside and outside of prison what life is like for them under brutalizing, punitive, and also mundane conditions. Some are playing out fantasy or envisioning freedom. They are imagining worlds yet to come for those most impacted by criminalization and imprisonment. When I started my research, which first began with me exploring my own family’s experiences with incarceration, I focused on how artmaking and creative engagement were practices of belonging. I was captivated by the handmade greeting cards, envelope art, and the intimate portraits commonly made by incarcerated people and sent out to loved ones. So for me prison art is a really powerful aesthetic practice to mark presence and to connect with loved ones, kinfolks, real and imagined publics, and society at large.

Divining the Solution

By Carlo McCormick

Sometimes great art comes from very dark places. When so, it moves toward the light, if not dispelling the demons or solving the problems at least illuminating the shadows of neglect and pain with truth, inherent beauty, and the simple, graceful act of creativity. By any such measure, Guy Woodard is just such an artist. Self-taught, unmistakably gifted from an early age, and obsessive about asserting a degree of mastery over his craft, Woodard’s precision is not simply about pictorial acuity but about a keenness of perception and emotional honesty as well. Seen, felt, and delivered with the fullest commitment to realism of subject and meaning, his drawings are beholden to art’s most sacrosanct mission—to communicate—and find that elusive place where the one of self-expression meets the many of its audience and the me becomes we.

Produced with the humblest of implements—a ballpoint pen— Woodard’s DIY virtuosity speaks to an impoverishment of means and how talent in fact transcends tools, as if a kid banging on a trash can might kick it out as fine as Art Blakey at his bebop best.

The fact that these clumsy instruments could be the means for such an agile art is at once beside the point and crucial to our appreciation, for it is rare indeed that the quotidian can achieve the poetic. Circumstance in this way characterizes culture; this was after the sum of what he was allowed in incarceration. It would seem that something like paint and brushes would be far too dangerous to put in the hands of a nonviolent criminal, but at least we have further proof that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. Something in Guy’s hands worked with an acuity that belied its bluntness—able to shred the isolation of confinement— to reach beyond the limitations of space and hack through that very darkness to find illumination.

Perhaps, put away from society in this arcane construct of the penitentiary, we come to expect the benediction of profound

self-reflection as solitude must impose, but what is remarkable about these drawings is just how they eschew the big picture. This is an art of details, as minutely observed as they are painstakingly recorded and rendered. Woodard explains this as a matter of being nearsighted, but the close focus is so excruciating and exact it demands attention as it exercises it, functioning like a kind of latter-day pointillism, a dot technique that breaks down the whole into infinitesimal basics. Guy does not look up—he keeps his head down, focused on the task, without distraction of flights of fancy.

This intensity is his escape. Speaking of his childhood, where sickness confined him to bed, rather than his imprisonment, he told us that being alone is not the same thing as loneliness. No, this is not about penitence or salvation, those are the yolks of delusion religion uses in not so different a way than the concrete and steel of the prison industrial complex. Guy Woodard does not find the light by believing in God; he does so by trying to understand the frailty and strength of the human condition.

It is tempting and perhaps quite easy to forefront Woodard’s biography over his art. Already a few pals have told me what a great movie his life would make. Trust me however: we would not be bothering with his personal story at all if it was neither so much a part of his art and if that work were not significant on its own terms. This too is very much a story of light and darkness, the essential components of his binary mode of representation. Look carefully and you will see how the white space forms the picture.

There is no negative space per se; the light manifests form, the absence as palpable as the black that you almost can’t see. Guy Woodard calls this “maxi-minimalism,” how, much like the situation from which this art stems, you can do a lot with very little.

This dynamic between what is explicit and what is left unsaid is, in terms of visual language, a kind of participatory exercise—it is left up to us, the viewer, to fill in what is otherwise apparently not there. It is a coded language, deftly employed by an artist who is

something rather akin to a mathematician figuring out the hidden agenda and decipherable symmetry of all we accept as random and beyond our control. It is maybe in this way not too dissimilar from the understanding of a master forger and counterfeiter as he once was, a manner of divining the simplest solution to the greatest complexity, a truth lying in the fiction, what fools the eye to conjure the veracity of common currency.

In the deep humanism of his portraits and the moving innocence of the children he is so fond of as a subject matter, just as much as in the stunningly brutal witness of his Home Invasion series, there is an emotional subtext to Woodard’s unflinching realism— having witnessed the systems of control—how slavery, incarceration, and religion work as parallel modes of subjugation. It hurts, and does so not to make us feel better in the end, but to at least feel so that maybe we all might get better. A man who approaches his art with the same singular fascination as he invested in his former documentary impersonations, his pictures (much like his forgeries) take their own private pleasure in cracking the riddles of representation. So much is revealed but just as much remains hidden, like the way he secrets his signature (as did Al Hirschfeld, whose caricatures inspired him almost as much as the illustrative realism and narrative of Norman Rockwell) within his drawings, suggesting a self that is still some distance from full disclosure.

Rather more expository, accessible, and literal than most of what we see in contemporary art these days, Guy Woodard is still enchanted by something unseen within the explicit. Self-taught, late to the game of fine art, and consistently far more interested in figuring out what he can’t do than what comes easily, Guy tells us his art is just in its infancy at this point. He’s certainly gratified that for the first time in his life he doesn’t have to be a criminal to make a living, but whatever remunerations his art may not bring him are likely to enrich us so much more.

My Boy, 2002 Gouache on paper 25› x 21› x fl inches

Home Invasion, 2001–2002 Ballpoint pen on paper 29fl x 25› x 1 inches

Nightmare, 2001–2002 Ballpoint pen on paper 18 x 12fl x ≠ inches

Prayer, 2001–2002 Ballpoint pen on illustration board 31 x 25fl x 1 inches

Poor, 2001–2002 Ballpoint pen on peper 30‹ x 26fl x 1 inches

NEXT PAGE:

Target Achieved, 2001 Ballpoint pen on illustration board 26fl x 29fl x 1 inches

Slipping Into Darkness, 2016 Ballpoint pen on paper 33› x 25 x fl inches

RIGHT PAGE:

Bullpen Therapy, 1994 Ballpoint pen on paper 14 x 20 inches

PREVIOUS SPREAD LEFT

Murder Inc., 1995 Ballpoint pen on paper 25› x 21› x fl inches

PREVIOUS SPREAD RIGHT

Street Life, 2011 Ballpoint pen on paper 14 x 8› inches

Caged, 1995 Ballpoint pen on paper 29› x 23› x fl inches

The Door, 1994 Ballpoint pen on paper 38› x 27› x fl inches

Black Forest, 1995 Digital print on aluminum 35› x 29 x  inches

If I Could, 2012 Ballpoint pen on paper 29› x 25› x fl inches

Chicago, 2016 Ballpoint pen on paper 31› x 28› x fl inches

FOLLOWING SPREAD LEFT

Bombay, 2014 Ballpoint pen on paper 28› x 25› x fl inches

FOLLOWING SPREAD RIGHT

Sao Paulo, 2014 Ballpoint pen on paper 17 x 14 inches

Vogue, 2014 Ballpoint pen and colored pencil on paper 28› x 25› x fl inches

Guy Woodard, Artist

By David Rothenberg

Guy Woodard is an inspiration, a reminder that anything is possible. As his art talent is revealed, he has reclaimed his life in the process.

Three days after Guy was released from state prison (in August 2015), he schlepped over to radio station WBAI on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Someone sent word to me, when I was upstairs on the air, that there was a man who would like to see me.

I asked if the man had a gun, and the messenger responded, “No he has some drawings.”

After the program, Guy introduced himself to me outside. He said that he had been listening to me on the radio for years and wanted me to see his art.

On a Brooklyn street on a hot summer day, he stood proudly while I looked in awe as his collection unfolded before me.

When he told me he was living in a men’s shelter—ostensibly homeless—with a long history of incarceration, doing time on the installment plan, I told him his work was too good, too valuable to be housed in a shelter…and invited him to meet me at the Fortune Society in Long Island City on Monday morning. I knew we could find a safe place to store his work and, perhaps, space which would allow him to continue his passion.

After Guy’s work was safely entrenched, it was evident that the artist—as well as his art—needed new housing. Guy was interviewed and accepted as a resident in The Castle, The Fortune Society’s transitional home for homeless, formerly incarcerated men and women. He lived there for more than a year before

finding an apartment in Fortune’s permanent housing in Castle Gardens, located in West Harlem.

Guy began volunteering at Fortune and designed an art class for young men and women in the ATI (Alternative to Incarceration) program. It has become part of the daily curriculum at Fortune.

A measure of the success of Guy’s art class can be determined by the look on the faces of the students and their teacher. The students are learning about art…but they are also becoming acquainted with creating an environment of support.

Guy loves showing their newfound skills. He’s as proud of his students as he is of his own art.

...

The Fortune Society began in 1967, stemming from discussions after shows of an Off-Broadway prison drama, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, which David Rothenberg helped produce. Fortune is aware of the role of the arts in creating opportunities through music, theatre, writing, and drawing—all a vital part of who we are. The need to express oneself is not limited to a select privileged segment of the population. It is part of the healing process for men and women who come to Fortune.

Guy Woodard’s lifetime search to find alternatives to his choices —which always resulted in imprisonment—has been successfully attained. His unique talent found a home at The Fortune Society.

Now the rest of the world is invited to join in, to recognize and celebrate Guy. The man, like his art, is a treasure.

Take A Knee, 2019 Mixed media on paper tacked to foam core 36 x 36 x › inches

Had Aiyana Lived, 2019 Digital print 8› x 11 inches

Had Andy Lived, 2019 Digital print 8› x 11 inches

Had Trayvon Lived, 2019 Digital print 8› x 11 inches

Had Tamir Lived, 2019 Digital print 8› x 11 inches

Nino Brown’s Con Ed Bill, 2019 Digital print 8› x 10› inches (Nino Brown is the father from the drawing Home Invasion)

Thomas Green’s Social Security Card, 2019 Digital print 2 x 3‹ inches

OPPOSITE PAGE:

J J Brown’s Birth Certificate, 2019 Digital print 6fl x 5fl inches (JJ is the boy from Home Invasion, Nightmare, Prayer, Poor, and Target Achieved)

Thomas Green’s Driver’s License, 2019 Digital print 2 x 3‹ inches

OPPOSITE PAGE:

Untitled, 2014 Ballpoint pen on paper 25› x 21› x fl inches

Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker Board of Advisors Dan Cameron Curt Hoppe Carlo McCormick Marc H Miller Maynard Monrow Lisa Brownlee James Rubio Debora Tripodi Howl! Board of Directors Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus In Memoriam of our Beloved Board Member, Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick

Guy Woodard We the People Published on the occasion of the exhibition June 19–July 21, 2019 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project © 2019 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 32 ISBN: 978-1-7338785-2-4 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. © 2019 Carlo McCormick © 2019 David Rothenberg Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. NY, NY 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper

Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Founder and Director: Jane Friedman Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Assistant Director: Josh Nierodzinski Director of Education: Katherine Cheairs Program Coordinator: Sam O’Hana Collection Manager: Corinne Gatesmith Production: Ramsey Chahine Marketing and Public Relations: Susan Martin Documentarian: Yoon Gallery design: Space ODT/Teddy Kofman Creative Consultant: Some Serious Business Gallery Photographer: Jason Wyche

The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman