As an artist, 66-year-old Jamie Diaz straddles a number of worlds of marginalization.
As a trans girl, her work is much less prone to obtain the discover and acclaim garnered by her cisgender friends. As an incarcerated artist, jail guidelines mount greater hurdles to even expressing her creativity. Sharing her artwork with the skin world poses even larger challenges.
Individuals behind bars have lengthy created artwork–to precise themselves, to recollect their lives outdoors jail partitions, to soar previous the despairs of incarceration and to remind themselves and viewers that they’re greater than their most dangerous choices. Generally their work reaches a restricted viewers, however their viewers are most frequently confined to quick household and mates.
Current years have seen an elevated public curiosity in jail artwork, notably Nicole Fleetwood’s “Marking Time” rocking the Museum of Trendy Artwork/PS1 and Jesse Krimes’ meteoric rise into the artwork world even earlier than his launch from jail. However simply as artwork by LGBTQIA+ individuals stays largely ignored and marginalized, works by incarcerated LGBTQIA+ artists—notably incarcerated trans ladies—hardly ever discover a place on this new highlight.
As an incarcerated trans girl, particularly one confined in a small Texas jail city, the probabilities that Jamie’s work wouldn’t solely be considered by a wider viewers, however obtain a solo present in a significant New York Metropolis gallery are almost nil. But Jamie has performed simply that. The documentary Love, Jamie chronicles not solely her journey by means of the innumerable odds stacked towards her, but in addition is a robust testomony to group and friendship.
Creating artwork not solely challenges jail efforts to dehumanize its occupants, however may construct a bridge between these inside and outdoors jail partitions.
In 2013, Jamie Diaz wrote a letter to Black & Pink, a gaggle that helps LGBTQIA+ individuals behind bars. Volunteer Gabriel Joffe opened her letter, and, amazed by her artwork, wrote again. That sparked a friendship that has solely deepened over a decade.
Theirs just isn’t a one-way friendship. Gabriel recounted that, once they first related with Jamie, they had been of their early 20s and navigating fixed transphobic harassment. Jamie, almost twice their age, grew to become a confidante who shared her personal experiences of rising up trans in the course of the Sixties. “We had been in a position to construct up an intimacy that I don’t have with some those who I do know in individual,” Gabriel recalled.
Their friendship has additionally been a lifeline for Jamie. Throughout the nation, transphobic insurance policies and particular person biases incessantly exclude trans individuals from training, housing, employment, well being care and different alternatives in addition to harassment and violence in public. They’re additionally disproportionately criminalized and incarcerated. One examine discovered that 15 p.c, or almost one in six, trans individuals had been incarcerated in some unspecified time in the future of their lives.1 That disproportionate fee is even greater for trans individuals of shade.
Many states place trans ladies in male prisons—and Texas is not any exception. As a trans girl in a males’s jail, Jamie was at fixed danger of sexual harassment, abuse and assault by each different incarcerated individuals and workers. Throughout the nation, trans persons are 9 occasions extra prone to be harassed or assaulted whereas behind bars.
And assault just isn’t the one injustice she faces behind bars. One pencil-drawn comedian exhibits a guard writing her a disciplinary report, or a ticket that would result in additional punishment, for an “excessive hair fashion.” Sadly, that punishment just isn’t an anomaly—queer and trans individuals typically face jail sanctions for expressing their gender id, a punishment that’s not meted out to their cisgender counterparts.
One other comedian illustrates life in solitary confinement—the place she is locked in a tiny cell for greater than 22 hours every day. It’s a placement ostensibly to guard her from harassment and violence, however the excessive isolation has been confirmed to trigger lasting psychological, bodily and emotional injury. Her expertise is much from distinctive—a survey of 280 trans individuals imprisoned in 31 states discovered that just about 90 p.c had, in some unspecified time in the future, been positioned in solitary. For a lot of, that was the jail’s solely answer to separating them from individuals who threatened them.
Love, Jamie weaves in these dismal realities and the numerous obstacles that prisons make use of to stifle creativity with Jamie Diaz’s ingenuity in the direction of reaching her purpose—to construct the most important assortment of queer artwork on this planet.
Not the most important assortment of jail queer artwork, however the world’s largest assortment of queer artwork. Interval.
Whereas she has spent almost three a long time behind bars, Jamie makes it clear that incarceration doesn’t outline her life—or her artwork. “If I come out, I’ll now not paint any art work associated to jail life,” she says, her voice half-muffled by means of the jail cellphone line. Even behind bars, a lot of her artwork soars above the on a regular basis banality and brutality behind jail partitions.
Few prisons supply packages that foster creativity despite the fact that individuals who participate in such packages are far much less prone to recidivate, or find yourself behind bars once more. As a substitute, prisons stifle creativity—each by means of their restrictions on supplies and the violence and chaos that may—and sometimes do—trigger hopelessness. To avoid the primary, Jamie long-established paint brushes from human hair, snagged white paint leftover from jail upkeep initiatives and used discovered supplies, like sparrow feathers from the jail yard, to intensify her work.
Such resourcefulness comes with the chance of additional punishment. Jail guidelines prohibit altering gadgets, which may embody combining hair and different objects to create brushes, or proudly owning scavenged provides, just like the paint and sparrow feathers Jamie utilized in her work. Ought to guards discover both of these throughout a cell search, they’ll—and sometimes do—hand out further punishments. These sanctions would possibly embody dropping cellphone calls, recreation (or the scant hour or two they’re allowed out of their cell) and/or the flexibility to purchase gadgets on the commissary. These losses would possibly final weeks; typically they’ll final a number of months.
However for Jamie Diaz and lots of different artists, the need to create, particularly in such a bleak surroundings, outweighs the potential retributions. Creating artwork counters the despair attributable to the fixed jail strife, violence and chaos. “You wouldn’t consider all of the issues I take into consideration after I’m engaged on my artwork,” Jamie mirrored.
“I’m going all around the world in my thoughts. Generally I even suppose I’m going to different worlds.”
Jail rules additionally restrict how a lot an individual can preserve of their cell. Searches by guards can—and incessantly do—injury their few possessions. These searches may result in confiscation of prohibited gadgets, together with an artist’s makeshift or repurposed artwork provides.
To make sure their security, every time Jamie completed a bit, she mailed it to Gabriel. They’ve stored every little thing—letters illustrated with colourful drawings, comics created with prison-issued pencils, colourful playing cards, portraits, nonetheless lives, surreal and unbelievable work of queer and trans ladies, darker jail iconography shaded with ballpoint pens. In addition they created an internet site to showcase her work to a broader viewers.
That friendship—and Gabriel’s dedication to sharing her work-led to Jamie’s first solo gallery exhibition in New York Metropolis, a milestone that only a few artists, and even fewer incarcerated artists, not to mention Mexican-American trans artists buried deep in Central Texas, ever obtain. One yr later, Jamie simply reached one other milestone—she was granted parole. Gabriel picked her up within the jail parking zone and, quickly after, the 2 attended Jamie’s first Delight as an out trans girl. The pair plan to search out a big home that enable each to keep up separate residing areas and for Jamie to have her personal artwork studio—one that permits her to freely gather supplies, create artwork and at last experiment with media, corresponding to oil paints and huge canvases, that had been forbidden in jail.
For the primary time, she can have her personal residing area the place she has full management over when she wakes, sleeps, eats and creates—and the assist of a trusted pal as she navigates freedom and a world that has dramatically modified after almost three a long time.
1 Web page 44: https://transequality.org/websites/default/recordsdata/docs/assets/NTDS_Report.pdf