For many, the experience of incarceration is not only isolating, but alienating. To maintain a human connection with loved ones while behind prison walls, extra effort is required. What was once an easy-to-make cell phone call is replaced by bought time over a prison phone. And while it may have once been easy to get in the car and drive to see a loved one, prison visits are tightly controlled.
For many families, visits also mean traveling long distances, making arrangements well in advance, and taking on additional costs. Those barriers can often make face-to-face time rare, leaving many incarcerated people with only occasional opportunities to see the people they love.
But some inmates incarcerated in Michigan are nurturing relationships with the people they care about through greeting cards they make by hand and send through the mail.
Today, some of these greeting cards are featured in an exhibition at the University of Michigan Detroit Center, called Postmarked From the Inside. The exhibition aims to showcase what limited freedoms look like in practice, particularly when it comes to restrictions on in-person visits and communication with those on the outside.
While most people may not think much about greeting cards and their intent, they can carry greater significance for someone who's rarely able to connect with the special people in their life. The cards featured in this exhibit vary in tone and circumstance, but they all depict their creators' emotional investment in the relationships they value most.
Finding art: Martín Vargas' story
Reflecting on having spent four decades behind bars, artist Martín Vargas said that "prison is very tense, very chaotic, very violent, angry, explosive." He added that "it's very difficult to recognize self, to pay attention to self, when there are so many external factors playing into each individual's mind."
He described peer pressure as "the biggest monster in the world," explaining how it was a burdensome influence over his early years in prison.
"It was a pressure of needing to belong and needing to be accepted. Unfortunately, needing to be accepted and to belong means doing things that we would not normally do on our own, but are being pressured by others to do."
After spending years managing that pressure, Vargas said he started to long for something different, something that would give him a sense of purpose, and that's when he found art.
"Every single second of the time when I was bent over a desk, drawing on a piece of paper, or applying paint on a canvas, or even studying art or teaching art," said Vargas, "was a second that I could get away and remove myself from the violence and the surroundings that I was in every single second of the day. But when I got into art, it was like, this was my own space — nobody else can come in here unless I let them in."
In the eight years since being released from prison, Vargas said he feels fortunate to have held up mentally, emotionally, and physically. For that reason, he's had the bandwidth to serve as a curator of the exhibit. He acknowledges that, for many who've spent a similar amount of time behind bars as he has, it wouldn't be as easy to tap into their prison experience again.
The harsh realities of incarceration
According to the exhibit's chief curator, Vitalis Im, many of the greeting cards featured were donated by families whose loved ones remain behind bars. Among the cards featured: a holiday-themed one, depicting two snow people hugging; one with a drawing of a brown bear holding a heart that's labeled "sorry"; and another that sends a simple message: "I love you," with each word written on a different heart.
Im, who's also an assistant professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, spoke about the harsh realities revealed in his work with the Prison Creative Arts Project, based at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
"Prisons often state that their goals are to 'rehabilitate' or to heal, but in fact, when you talk to artists or anybody in prison, what you hear are the ways in which people are torn apart from their families, from their partners, from their children," said Im.
One example of that separation, Im recalled, is from his first visit with incarcerated artists, when he connected with one inmate who had painted an elephant — an allusion to the animal's long term memory. As Im explained, the piece was a "means by which he could remember and mourn the loss of his brother," who had died during the COVID-19 pandemic. That artist, Im said, was denied the chance to attend his brother's funeral — both in person or virtually.
For Im, seeing the cards created by incarcerated individuals comes with an unavoidable understanding that every single one of them reflects the experience of a human being marked by a deep sense of loss and longing.
"Greeting cards are actually one of the most heartbreaking things, I think, that you can really bear witness to," explained Im, "in the sense that these are artists and people in prison who are doing such extraordinarily creative things to make up for lost birthdays, anniversaries, missed graduations, birth of a grandchild."
While these greeting cards showcase an incarcerated person's resilience, Im said they also reflect "how incredibly violent prisons are, in terms of tearing people apart from one another."
His goal, as chief curator of this exhibit, was to not just showcase the resilience of these artists, but also how "incredibly violent prisons are, in terms of tearing people apart from one another."
With greeting cards, however, inmates have found an antidote to that violence: For Vargas, creating art while incarcerated became an opportunity to find his own sense of self.
Postmarked From the Inside runs now through August 31 at the University of Michigan Detroit Center. More on the exhibition, including its other curators, can be found here.
