‘A saving gesture’: the art exhibition spotlighting US prisoners’ creations

A trio of shows at Michigan’s Grand Rapids Art Museum humanizes people who are incarcerated and celebrates the resilience of creativity

W ith nearly 2 million people behind bars, America is the global leader in incarceration. When you look at it per capita, we have the highest rate of incarceration of any independent democracy and rank fourth overall in the world, just behind El Salvador, Cuba and Turkmenistan.

Despite these troubling numbers, mass imprisonment is largely invisible. “Our carceral system is something we as a society try to separate out from the everyday,” observes Terra Warren, an assistant curator at Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan , who alongside curator Jennifer Wcisel brings audiences three solo shows from artists Julie Green, Gary Tyler and Ray Materson. They collectively aim to make us examine more closely just what prisons are doing to our society, and how art can prove transformative to those incarcerated.

In a major feat, Green’s show collects her work The Last Supper, rarely exhibited in full. This masterpiece took 22 years to complete and comprises nearly 1,000 plates, each depicting the final meal requested by an individual on death row prior to their execution. Poignantly, many of the plates are simply inscribed with the word “none,” indicating when an inmate opted not to eat a final meal. One imagines it would be hard to find an appetite under such conditions.

In centering breaking bread, a practice that’s a cornerstone of our shared humanity, The Last Supper forces audiences to reckon with the contradictions of a system that at once gives the pleasure of consuming a fine meal, yet also dehumanizes and even puts to death those within its grasp. Additionally, the piece opens space for compassion and understanding by giving us a window into the lives of those who are rarely represented in any meaningful way at all.

“There’s one in particular where a prisoner opted to eat vending machine food with their family,” Warren says, recalling plates that particularly stood put in her memory. “There’s another whose mother was allowed to come in and cook their last meal.”

Some of the plates also underscore the fact that the state will put to death individuals who are not even aware of what’s happening; one plate indicates that an inmate chose to save some of their last meal for later, not understanding that there would not be a chance to ever eat again. “One of the plates details that a person with an IQ of 61 was executed,” said Warren, indicating someone was put to death in spite of serious mental impairments.

D eath row figures prominently in the life of Gary Tyler, an author and artist, who in 1974 was charged with the murder of a white teenager when Tyler was 16 years old. When he was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death, he became the youngest person on death row in the United States. The case was marred by police misconduct, and Tyler is now widely considered to have been wrongfully imprisoned.

Although Tyler was never formally exonerated, he was freed in 2016 following the supreme court ruling in the 2012 Miller v Alabama case, where the court held that it was unconstitutional to adjudicate mandatory sentences of life imprisonment for juvenile defendants.

While serving four decades in the infamous Angola state prison, known as the Alcatraz of the South and currently the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, Tyler began to make quilts to comfort inmates dying in the prison’s hospice. At first reluctant to work with textiles, he soon saw just how valued his creations were. “I saw that I could help the men in the hospice, so it was something that I warmed up to,” Tyler said. “I realized we were doing something that would last for generations in the family. When our patients passed, the quilt was passed into their family, and it was really moving for me.”

As Tyler continued making quilts for dying inmates, he developed a perspective that would later inform his transition to making textile art, and that would help him be able to tell his own story through the intricate quilts that he had made for years as an artist. “You realize that that could be you, and it will be you eventually, you’re just as human as the individual you’re taking care of,” he says. “Being a hospital volunteer was one of the greatest things in my life. I never would have thought that I had the creative gene in me.”

Tyler’s quilts tend to be backgrounded by static colors shot through with rich texture and repeating motifs, flowers in one, abstract, tear-shapes in another. The scenes they depict are vivid and powerful: a bull smacking over a red table, a man literally struggling under the weight of the world, a child in shackles with their back turned to us.

One work that stands out in Tyler’s mind depicts a moment from the trial, when he was being led away from the courthouse in handcuffs by an escort of police, while a crowd of supporters cheered for him. “I got this surge of energy,” he says. “I wanted to raise my hands in a fist, but I had handcuffs on, with deputies holding my arms, but I still managed to show defiance, that despite what happened I would continue to fight.”

T he Grand Rapids trio is rounded out by a comprehensive museum survey of Ray Materson, the outsider embroidery artist, who developed his signature technique of working with unraveled socks by necessity while serving seven years in prison due to drug addiction.

While boxer shorts and bedsheets could supply Materson with plenty of white thread, socks were of special importance to him, as they gave him the colors that he required in order to create intricate scenes. He would spend hours and hours simply getting the dearly needed materials. “Ray said to me one time: ‘Your biggest enemy in prison is the clock,’” said Warren. “For him to be able to spend days and days in this meditative act was such a saving gesture.”

Materson’s skills quickly became known to the other inmates, who soon began asking him to make embroidery of loved ones or items such as national flags with great symbolic meaning. These pieces gave Materson a purpose and allowed the men he created for to experience of sense of identity and selfhood in a profoundly dehumanizing environment.

Life in prison has stuck with Materson, who to this day sources vintage socks like the ones he used while in jail in the 1980s. “Their nylon has the stretchability that he needs in order to work,” explained Warren. His work tends to depict intense scenes, often derived from the likes of Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov, as well as royalty like Queen Victoria and Catherine the Great. While small, often measuring just 2in x 3in, the works are filled with pathos and are a wonder to behold.

“This show brings a lot of shock at the facts of what’s the reality for a lot of people, but they also bring a lot of hope,” said Warren, sharing her hopes that the art on display can both humanize and inspire, as well as show audiences that artistic creation can be transformative for them too. “Ray was on a track of death through his addiction, but because of art his life turned around into something defined by creativity and giving.”

Julie Green: The Last Supper; Gary Tyler: Rebirth and Ray Materson: Metamorphosis are all at Grand Rapids Art Museum from 3 October 2026 until 24 October 2027 (Green) and 3 January 2027 (Tyler, Materson)