Community members packed the Feb. 7 opening reception of the “Art from the Inside Out” exhibition at Public Space One’s Close House, giving me the feel-goods. I saw a woman I used to work with and met her mother; I saw friends and met their grandchild. Artists and their families were there, and it was the most class-diverse art show I’ve attended. It felt divine because I saw the Iowa City community as it is, not what it is assumed to be.
This is the show’s third year at the location, which spreads over three galleries featuring paintings, prints, works on paper, a few ceramics and a multimedia installation.
In remarks from formerly incarcerated artists Lloyd Offutt and Doren Walker, a current Inside Out Reentry Community board member, one begins to understand that art on the inside functions as business enterprise, currency and personal expression. Offutt explained art-making as a hustle: You “don’t get paid for the work you do” in prison, thus it is “art as survival,” both economic and emotional, to earn money for small comforts and satisfy that “need to do” art.
Offutt’s work demonstrates both: it consists of cards made to sell, colored pencil drawings with nature and religious subjects, and a unique textile with praying hands holding a cross, created with blue, black, red and purple pen inks on a handkerchief.
What stands out in the first gallery is the ingenuity in the selection and creation of art materials and the works themselves. Xaldin Lash’s featured works are mostly anime drawings done in colored pencil and pen. As part of his installation, he included examples of flexible safety pens, the only pen type available through the commissary, with a note, “Hope you can appreciate HOW FREAKING HARD it is to draw with one.”
They resembled my ballpoint ink refill, so I took it out and took notes with it. I started drafting this review by hand, and yes, gripping and writing with something of that length and circumference hurts.
Another Lash piece, Flower, is a painting made with yellow, orange, and red Kool-Aid and coffee. The flower’s raised coffee outline, creates dimension on the page. Another artist using Kool-Aid to good effect is CARNI. Killer Attitude Adjustment (2024) is an image of four knives, each with a portion of a horror villain’s face. It is a monochromatic flex pen drawing on canvas, with red blood spatter made from Kool-Aid and hairspray, giving the piece a colorful and luminous overglaze.
Though there is bright and colorful work throughout the entire exhibition, I associate the middle gallery with brightness the most. Nezzy Conway’s abstract paintings are full of beautiful color combinations, including one work with neon purple, orange and red that catches the eye, its warmth much appreciated in winter.
Taking up a corner of this gallery is Chris Martin’s installation of a basketball backboard filled with gold resin and lights, an ode to Caitlin Clark. Together with various Popsicle-stick canvases around it, including his well-known portrait of Hayden Fry, it becomes an altar to Hawkeye sports.
Stanley Hart III’s images of animals and flowers all use a stippling technique, in which paint and/or ink are applied in small dots. Each small dot is methodical, identical, and the four pieces on display are part of his ongoing “The Responsibility & Remorse Collection,” a series of over 140 of these stippled images. Hart considers them a gesture of restorative justice: as indicated in his artist statement, “I was showing my responsibility and remorse with each picture completed.” Each are beautiful objects created from careful meditation on his past actions and their effects on people familiar with these actions.
The artwork on display showcases a range of styles, skill levels and media. All point to the ways that art plays a significant role in coping, making a few extra dollars, relieving boredom and/or atoning. Most importantly, though, the exhibition offers us the evergreen reminder that to make art is be human.
Inside Out Reentry Community Executive Director Michelle Heinz speaks at the Opening Reception for Art from the Inside. — Photo by Abbie Bouska courtesy of Inside Out Reentry Community 
Crowd at the Opening Reception for Art from the Inside — Photo by Abbie Bouska courtesy of Inside Out Reentry Community
Inside Out’s Executive Director Michelle Heinz succinctly described its impetus: “to sho[w] the humanity of the folks involved.” To think otherwise is to accept the world as it is; this show is telling you there is another way.
Full disclosure: I helped to install this year’s “Art from the Inside Out” exhibition. It remains on display through Feb. 15.
