Projects developed by PNAP members inside and outside the prison are designed to engage issues and bring forward the questions and visions of the students in our classes. Over the years, PNAP members have developed projects specific to individual courses and created themes that are discussed and developed in many classes, over several semesters. Projects materialize as videos, installations, paintings, works on paper, performances, and texts. Content for projects is often developed across a range of communities: artists in the prison, poets in Chicago, students in university classes, community partners. PNAP members have worked collaboratively to author books, create public artworks, produce touring exhibitions, and more. PNAP projects have been used in K-12 and college classrooms, projected on prison walls, and performed in parks and at Stateville prison.
This project chronicles collaborative photographs created during a six-month-long correspondence with Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education…
PNAP and Love & Protect collaborated to put on an outdoor artmaking and quilting event…
This portrait project began in May of 2021, when PNAP staff member and SAIC art…
We teamed up with the DuSable Museum of African American History to paint new community…
As a tool to discuss the limits and ideals of human rights within a carceral…
The 51st (Free) State is a body of work that includes emblems, songs, choreography, graphic…
A series of thematic works addressing long-term sentencing policies and the other long terms they…
This project examines the “citizen” as a socio-political framework that functions to both grant rights…
It’s Now is a public mural project designed by artists at Stateville with artist Aaron…
Letters from the Future was a project developed in 2016 that asked incarcerated artists to…
In 2014-2015 artists at Stateville created two bodies of works that considered self-representation.
One Day a Week is a 30-minute video of interviews with artists, writers, and scholars…
This project is a set of oversized bookmarks that display lists of books people wanted…
Freedom Dreams was a 2015 collaboration between PNAP and the Social Justice Initiative at UIC…
Between 2013 and 2014, PNAP worked with 11 artists at Stateville on a year-long project…
Self-published anthologies of student writing and recordings of poetry from select PNAP courses and exhibitions….