Marietta Tierney Cleasby

Marietta also has been a volunteer art instructor for many years in the Rhode Island Department of Corrections. Each year the Atrium Gallery in Providence displays the work of her inmate students -- here is a link to the 2011 ACI Show.

The following article about Marietta's work with inmates appeared in the Providence Journal on May 15, 2009: Amid the classroom chatter of artists critiquing each other's work or debating the respective advantages of graphite or colored pencils, Wesley J. Mello was holding forth on watercolor technique. "A little more pigment at the top. Let it run down the page," he counseled a novice who was grappling with the sky in a Yosemite landscape. "If you want a smooth transition, hold the thing up."

Unlike pen or pencil, where the lines are clear and easily commanded, Mello said watercolor was about, literally, going with the flow. "That's when you get it, if you can stop trying to manipulate it and let it be its own thing," he said. "It took me years to understand watercolor. I don't understand it, I respect it."

It was the kind of insight you'd expect in a Rhode Island School of Design art class, but it was happening Tuesday night in a meeting room in the John Moran Medium Security Prison at the Adult Correctional Institutions, where Mello is one of about a hundred ACI prisoners who meet once a week for art instruction.

Some of the fruits of the program can been seen through the end of the month in the "Arts in Corrections," a show by the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts presenting 135 works by 41 prison artists in the atrium of the state Department of Administration Building across from the Capitol on Smith Street.

Council Executive Director Randall Rosenbaum said of all its shows, prisoner art generates the most comments. "It's a somewhat unique show," he said of the works by, among others, 15 convicted murderers, 5 robbers and 5 child molesters. " ... Of all the shows, this contains the most powerful work."

The art defies categorization. There are hyper-detailed motorcycles, portraits of men and women laughing or lost in thought. There are impressionistic landscapes, abstract dreamscapes and amalgams of shape and color mixed among works of heartbreaking tenderness, like a muscled soldier cradling an infant in his arms or a Madonna-like mother hugging her child.

The curator of the ACI collection is Marietta Cleasby, who has been running the art program for about 20 years. She started as a paid staffer, but when funding for the program was cut in the 1990s, she stayed on unpaid. In her life, she has worked as a college administrator and business-school teacher. But she will tell you those were things she did. An artist, she said, is what she is. "It's a personal thing for me," she said. "It's me, myself, trying to take something that was God-given. It's my talent, who I am. It's a way for me to make the world a better place."

A painter who favors portraits and landscapes of Martha Vineyard, Cleasby tries to bring the prisoners' art to the outside world, and bring art into their imprisoned one. "I didn't go into this with any expectations," she said. "I don't try to find out why they are there. I'm not trying to understand them through their art."

Instead, she tries to use art to help them understand themselves. Art can break the monotony of daily prison life, she said, and help change a prisoner's self-destructive outlook by enabling him to create things of beauty.

In an early exercise, she asks her students to divide a piece of paper into six sections and, in each one, draw a line that represents a word, like "peace" or "depression." They then pass the papers to each other and she asks them to pick out which line is associated with which feeling. Students from maximum-security prisoners, almost never match the emotions with the lines. "In high security, they don't get it," she said. In medium, more of them are able to pick out which line goes with which feeling, in minimum security, even more. "The closer to the street, the more they get it." Art, she said, can help give them that insight.

From James J. Silvestri, she unleashed a torrent. Before the ACI, he was a tattoo artist, but after numerous breaking-and-entering convictions, he was sentenced to eight years in 2006. He looks like a biker. His thick brown hair flows down past his shoulders like a lion's mane and his burly arms are covered in tattoos, most of them by him.

On paper, his specialty is motorcycles, but for all his detail, he has only ridden one three times in his life. He draws them parked, the steel and the chrome glistening. Sometimes you're looking up at one from low on the ground, other times it's as if you were above, looking down. The backgrounds are only lightly shaded. The inanimate machines seem alive. They burst through drawn borders, exhaust pipes writhing like silver snakes around intricately drawn engines.

Silvestri said he'll spend 50 hours on one drawing. Because he is in a prison, his tools are limited. He uses his identification badge as a straightedge and chessmen's round bases to keep his circles true. "This is my serenity," he said. "I stay in my cell. This is what I do all day: draw, draw and draw. You totally have to get it right. One mistake and it's gone, I throw it away." Art has given him a way to find something of value in his time at the ACI, Silvestri said. "I just made a lot of stupid decisions in my life," he said. " ... I told my wife and daughter, I'm going to do my time and I'm not going to waste any of my time."

Silvestri has another reason to focus on his drawing. Though he knows how long he'll be in prison, he doesn't know how much longer he'll be able to draw. He's been diagnosed with cone-rod dystrophy, an incurable eye disease that means the sensors inside his eyes are slowly disintegrating. When he sits across the table from someone, the other face is a blur. He speaks of it matter-of-factly, talking more about coping than complaining. He skips everything but meals, he said, so he can stay in his cell and squeeze as many drawings as he can from his fading vision. "This is what I do all day long, 'til l I go to sleep," he said, leaning over one of his drawings, his nose a couple of inches from the paper. He lifted his head up and contemplated the day when that trick won't work anymore. "I don't know what I'm going to do."

Brad Kryla exhibits his technique while working on a pastel during Marietta Cleasby's Advanced Art Class at the ACI as fellow inmates Jose DeArmas, far right, and Luis Negron look on. The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

Marietta Cleasby works with Josh Witherspoon on a watercolor at her advanced art class at the ACI. Cleasby says the program is "a way for me to make the world a better place." The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer