“Nothing, and no one, is safe at a prison,” asserts the late American artist and activist Faith Ringgold. The line launches Catherine Gund’s Paint Me a Road Out of Here, a thought-provoking, if uneven, documentary that investigates the history of a mural the artist created for the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island in 1972. Titled “For the Women’s House,” the piece was on view in a vestibule until 1988, when the jail’s inhabitants were relocated. What followed was a travesty of justice for the artwork’s treatment and display.
As the film tells it, the story of this mural is also that of the crisis at Rikers and of “prison” in spectacular decay — both Rikers as a site of atrocious conditions and the carceral system more broadly. Though technically a complex of jails for those awaiting a “swift and speedy trial” (a gross irony given the fact that the process can take years), Rikers has come to represent the failure of American Corrections writ large.
Much of the documentary follows artist and rapper Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, who served a year at Rikers in the late aughts, during which she was forced to give birth in shackles. Ruminative and down to earth, Baxter is a sympathetic whistleblower for the carceral system’s inhumanity, especially against those imprisoned while pregnant. A ward of the court by the age of 12, she exemplifies how social condition, rather than a series of “bad decisions,” often make “criminals.”
Offsetting the gravity of her advocacy, Baxter’s budding friendship with Ringgold is a delight to behold. “I was going to fight for liberation, but I didn’t get the grant,” Baxter jests to the bespectacled nonagenarian, quoting a button on the hazards of funded activism. In light of Ringgold’s pivotal role in the Black Power Movement, including participating in the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition’s historic rally against The (whitewashed) Whitney in 1968, it’s clear that her choice to create and gift “For the Women’s House” was motivated by a genuine desire to make art that effects change. Arguably, the same can be said of director Catherine Gund’s motives for making this movie. But as an anti-carceral feminist who has spent years teaching in a Missouri prison, I found some of the film’s methods and rhetoric fraught.
“We need that painting in a safe place,” Ringgold declares to a seated audience of New York arts patrons, “and that safe place is the Brooklyn Museum!” But if that’s the attitude from here on out — that artworks should be “safe” above all — art will never be seen by those who potentially need it most to resist and endure. While Ringgold’s determination to get her artwork out of harm’s way is admirable, Gund’s decision to paint a happy ending — including Rikers closing to be replaced with “smaller facilities” — is misleading on a number of levels, only one of which is the fact that no “smaller facilities” in New York exist that can house those individuals caged in Rikers today. Rikers is, further, unlikely to close by 2027, as was federally mandated last year. This is not a story of de-incarceration, let alone liberation, as audiences might pleasantly believe.
At best, Paint Me a Road indicts the evil of mass incarceration that, for more than half a century, has intensified racial and economic inequalities across the country. At worst, the film indulges in false equivalences between art and human life. We should lament the abuse of an artwork by a canonical Black American artist — not least because, for decades, that artist was excluded from the canon. We should applaud the Brooklyn Museum’s efforts to restore the painting and protect it from harm. But to seemingly conflate the painting’s rehabilitation with that of the two million incarcerated people raises ethical questions that the film nimbly sidesteps.
“Art gives us permission to imagine a world that currently doesn’t exist,” says Art for Justice’s Helena Huang, one of many lofty talking heads featured in the film. Paint Me a Road offers a glimpse of the cruelty of incarceration that does exist, and suggests — unconvincingly — that the security of “For the Women’s House” is good news for the nearly 200,000 women currently jailed or imprisoned in the United States today.
Paint Me a Road Out of Here is screening at the Film Forum (209 West Houston Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) through February 20.
