Art: Boom Behind Bars

In Mexico, where art sometimes crowds murder and politics off the front page, jailbirds are turning their cells into studios. Last week modern Mexican Painter Rufino Tamayo (TIME, Feb. 17), who now teaches art in Brooklyn, was combing Mexico’s prisons for new talent. Tamayo was sure he would find enough for a fall show at the Brooklyn Museum Art School.

Mexican prisoners scorn anything like escape art. Instead of landscapes, birds, or flowers, most of them daub away at private horrors. Samples: a half-human fetus turning away in fright from a street, a huge fist clutching eight cadavers, skeletons, three starved men craning their necks to catch driblets from a single spoon. One lifer, condemned for the murder of his wife and children, had dreamed up a lovely woman trailing blood across his cell floor.

This behind-bars art boom was started by 20 young proletarian artists, who call themselves “the Wedge.” The group is dedicated to teaching painting to people who otherwise would not know an easel from a weasel. Formed six years ago—when most of its members were still art students—the Wedgies have inspired some 600 proselytes (in & out of jail). Bricklayers, factory workers and carpenters by day, Wedge members invade the prisons at night, with armloads of free paint and canvas. For their work in provincial jails and small villages, the art missionaries dip into the group kitty, which is replenished from their meager wages.

Wedge workers are aggressively nonpolitical. They think that Mexico’s Big Three (Orozco, Siqueiros and Rivera) put too much propaganda into their work. Art, according to the Wedge, should concern itself with “misery, mercy, and feelings coming out of people’s entrails.”