This article originally appeared in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) Graduate Journal

Transcribed by Tamara Kostianovsky

I coordinate the art program at Eastern State Penitentiary, so my job is to solicit the artists. Right now we are in that process, we've posted the guidelines for artists and we've put them in our website and in other websites in the city and basically is more of a word of a mouth. People are interested in Eastern State, they hear that we have art, that we have the guidelines posted and that there are orientation tours. We want to have artists seeing the building because it's a unique place to exhibit because of the building itself and the building is ruined, there's no heat, no air conditioning, no running water, parts of it are collapsed. When you build an exhibit there, it has to last, this year the exhibitions lasted from May to November. They have to look good in May, but they also have to look good in November, because people would come and see it and sometimes we have problems with exhibits holding up. Also, what we think makes showing at Eastern State unique is the type of people who get to view the exhibits, we like the artist to come and see how people react to the work, how they move through the building. The majority of people who come to the prison don't come to see the art, I think, we are doing surveys to see that, we get some people who do come just to see art, but your piece is exposed to different types of people. Sometime artists think their exhibit is the only art that some people will see in the whole year, they may not go to the art museum or something like that. That's why we are trying to be selective of which art installations we put inside the prison. Our job in the committee is to make sure that these exhibits are going to work because we have a lot of proposals, and from being at the site everyday we realize that a proposal is not going to work, or is not going to last, so our main job is to make sure that the proposals are feasible, and that they are appropriate to the space.

All the art we show is site-specific, and the committee is pretty intend on that. It's site- specific in the sense that it has to fulfill our mission and it has to help us interpret the building, so the art exhibits are one way in which we interpret Eastern State's 173-year history. Our mission also is to bring up issues of criminal justice today. For example, one exhibit that we had this year, Prisoners of Age has large scale photographs and text of inmates in geriatric prisons in the US and the reason we picked that exhibit - besides it being a powerful exhibition - was because it brings up the question of what is going on now in Pennsylvania. It seems like a good idea, you see all these pictures of men that are no longer a threat to community. They are not going to get out of prison because life means life in Pennsylvania, so that sort of fulfills our mission of bring up issues of criminal justice today.

None of the exhibits can present any particular position. We don't take positions. It either brings up an issue, and the public can think about it and we want them to discuss it essentially and come to their own conclusions, or it can help people to look at the prison in a different way. In Erin Weckerle's Evidence, for instance, she filled an entire corridor with pillows. It's pretty simple and she wanted the meaning of the piece to be vague. It's interesting to see how people react to it because, like I said, there are a lot people who aren't there to see art, so they go in and they said "What is this?" and then they say "Oh, it's an art exhibit, pillows on the floor" and then when they look at it, think about it and understand it. There are some metaphors that she wants to portrait, such as softening the harsh physical environment of the prison, but she wants visitors to remember that prisoners are people, that there were people in this building. Today we have an 11-acre building with no inmates and one of the things that we struggle with is to create the concept that there were people living here. The public likes her exhibit because they can get the metaphor that's simple but they can also take their own meaning out of it.

My favorite exhibit was called the Criminal Us. A lot of times we get visitors who come to the prison and they see it as a prison, a place they would never be, and in this case we took a cell block and it was completely dark and the artist just had patterns of light on the wall.

Dick Torchia's exhibit was the longest running exhibit at Eastern and this year we don't have it. Dick is now on the committee. Daylights was an exhibit that was very powerful and people liked it if they took the time to really go through, to see what was there. It was very easy to walk through the hallway and not really understand what was happening. It was a powerful piece and we actually left one of the camera obscura lenses in a cell. It was sad to see it go.

The committee wants to try to get different types of exhibits and new exhibits, things that haven't been done before to give artists a chance to come up with new ideas. A lot of the artists that we get are up-and-coming artists. We do get some artists like Dick Torchia who are well-respected artists in the city, but we get a lot of younger artists, and this is the first time they get to try something out. Erin Wecklerle's piece was her first major installation.

There are lots of issues in the building that call artists' attention. There are religious overtones in the architecture: the arch ceilings, the radial plan, the original circular skylights in the cells that were called "the eye of God". We have a piece this year by Michael Grothusen, which plays with the element of time. He created a sundial that is called Midway to Another Day --it's the first outdoor piece that we had in a while-- it says "You are here, you are half way to the next day," and there's really nothing else, there's not a lot you have to do in prison, so time is one thing artists play on.

And the building itself is a big issue. Some of the exhibits that work better are those in which the piece tries not to compete with the building. Ilan Sandler's piece Arrest, is just wired text on cell doors with sound. It is one of our most popular pieces. His piece doesn't play off the building as much as other pieces do. It's an appropriate piece because it portrays the victim's side and that doesn't always come out.

I think Eastern State is a place where you can respond to what's happening to society.