Giving Compass' Take:

• Celina Fang at The Marshall Project highlights artist Jesse Krimes’s latest work using quilts and other forms of art to address increasing incarceration rates in small-town America.

• How do the arts help incarcerated individuals build skills for their future? How can donors invest in prison education programs to better the future of these individuals? 

• Here's another look inside prison art programs. 

In 1851, the rolling green hills of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, were the scene of the Christiana Riot, an armed uprising against the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the capture and return of enslaved people who had escaped. The revolt took place nine miles from the site of a new art installation exploring rural incarceration—a fact that was not lost on the artist, Jesse Krimes.

“It was important for me to trace the history of slavery into Jim Crow into convict leasing, into segregation and all of those things into mass incarceration,” said Krimes, a formerly-incarcerated artist whose latest work combines a series of quilts and an interactive corn maze.

The scale of the installation, called “Voices from the Heartland: Safety, Justice, and Community in Small and Rural America,” is ambitious and its components intricately detailed. But perhaps most striking is Krimes’s use of artwork and stories from incarcerated people themselves.

Read the full article about art and rural incarceration by Celina Fang at The Marshall Project.