Giving Compass' Take:

· Dr. Lauren Neefe shares how she incorporated art and music from the High Museum in her curriculum at the Metro Reentry Facility in Atlanta.

· 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. 

Rainer Maria Rilke famously lands his 1908 poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” on the most radical of injunctions: “You must change your life.” Weighing in at a mere half line, the sentence punctuates a four-stanza body scan of the sculpture—denuded of head, arms, legs, and phallus—that gives the poem its title. American poet Mark Doty has called it “the sharpest last-minute turn in sonnet history.” The shock of it does have a way of raising the hair on the neck.

Last fall, as the volunteer site director for Common Good Atlanta’s education program at Metro Reentry Facility, the newly reopened and “re-missioned” state prison in southeast Atlanta, I was given the opportunity to give a series of lectures on art and art history to the 28 incarcerated students in our college course. My doctoral training is in English literature and poetry, not art history; but I knew I was up to the task of introducing art as a contested category of culture and knowledge, and I knew I wanted to begin with Rilke’s sonnet. Everything about the daily experience of an incarcerated person surely enforces the imperative of that final line as dictum rather than votive offering. If Rilke’s poetic gambit turns on the relay from speaker to reader of the ruined sculpture’s invitation, then my educational gambit was to relay the invitation in kind. Maybe I could reframe the obligations of punitive discipline as the pleasures of an aesthetic one. Maybe the students and I could write over the indignities of one kind of suffering with the dignity of another, the kind artists and scholars know as passion.

Read the full article about teaching the arts in prison by Dr. Lauren Neefe and Kate McLeod at the ARTS Blog.