Making and sharing art is powerful — and maybe even more so for people who are incarcerated. That's the premise behind a huge new initiative from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which is pledging $125 million to arts and humanities organizations that focus on mass incarceration.
In 1991 in Ohio, Dean Gillespie was convicted and then imprisoned for 20 years for crimes that he was later found not to have committed. While he was incarcerated, he kept his sanity by creating miniature sculptures out of things he scavenged from around the prison. He created whimsical bits of Americana from stuff like the foil from packages of cigarettes, used tea bags and pins from the prison sewing room.
