BRIAN MAGUIRE: THE BAYVIEW PROJECT
9 November  4 January 2003
Curated by Fergus McCaffrey

WHITE BOX is pleased to announce an exhibition and billboard art project Brian Maguire: The Bayview Project. Organized by the curator Fergus McCaffrey, The Bayview Project is a collaboration between the Irish artist Brian Maguire and thirteen women prisoners over a seventeen-month period at the Bayview Correctional Facility in the Chelsea district of New York City.

The Bayview Project is comprised of: an exhibition of Maguire s portraits of the thirteen women and twenty works by the inmates at WHITE BOX; a 20 x 60 foot billboard located at 20th Street & 10th Avenue; and a seminar Penal Policy: New York State. The exhibition and billboard will be on view from November 9th  December 20th, with a reception for the artist at WHITE BOX on November 9th from 6  8 PM. The seminar will take place at WHITE BOX on December 13th at 7.00 PM.

Brian Maguire s art practice is expansive and related to human interaction. Inside Bayview Maguire encouraged and assisted the prisoners in making their own work during workshops. With the consent of the prisoners, he also painted their portraits during concentrated periods of time. These prison portraits represent a form of social alchemy, where the traditional portrait  a symbol of social status and achievement  is subverted and used to assert the value of the incarcerated. Through this affirmation of worth the individual is enabled to break the bonds of institutionalization.

During the course of the projects  workshops the young and middle aged women allowed the self, the other, close relationships, social environments, related values, and possessions to become the focus for a series of intense exchanges, through the medium of paint.

Over the last 15 years, Maguire has undertaken a series of projects in Europe and South America. Representing Ireland at the 1998 Sao Paolo Biennial, Maguire presented work arising from workshops in the notorious Carandoru State Prison. In Ireland over a twelve-year period he has developed a cross-disciplinary arts initiative in maximum-security prisons, which are linked to the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. This had lead to released prisoners completing degree courses in fine art. Throughout Maguire s objective is not the sensationalization of crime, but rather the opposite. Maguire s seeks to reveal the very ordinariness and humanity of the prisoners and to tell their stories.

Following controversy in March 2002, New York State raised doubts over the prisoners  participation in the exhibition. From the beginning The Bayview Project was conceived as an exhibition of the portraits and the workshop paintings at WHITE BOX. However, intervention by the New York Civil Liberties Union on behalf of WHITE BOX clarified the situation, making it possible for the exhibition to take place as planned.

Press
Show: The Bayview Project
Publication: The New York Times --The City  Section 14
Article/Writer: COPING/NICHOLE M. CHRISTIAN

Invisible Women Regain Public Faces

On a billboard high above 20th Street and 10th Avenue in Chelsea, the faces of four women stare down, daring you not to see them. On the surface, the billboard is just another clever Manhattan advertising ploy, and eye-catching invitation to a new exhibition at the White Box gallery on West 26th Street. But look closer. There s more to this story.
These are not glamorous faces. They are not made up. They are real  portraits, actually  of women who are from the neighborhood but not of it. The faces belong to mothers, daughters, wives  women who for myriad ugly reasons live locked up in Bayview, a minimum-security prison on Chelsea s edge, tucked safely out of sight from the art dealers and gallery crawlers who circle the streets looking for signs of the second coming of SoHo.
In a way, the billboard has brought the women of Bayview to life or at least into view, proving, as so often happens in New York, that the most divergent of worlds can find reason to collide and coexist.

The reason in this case is an Irish artist named Brian Maguire. Last summer, he traveled from Dublin to paint the women as a favor to a friend, Fergus McCaffrey, an art curator. Like many of Chelsea s new arrivals, Mr. McCaffrey had discovered the women by chance while working in a nearby warehouse.
They whistled at him, a gesture that triggered his curiosity and a phone call pleading for Mr. Maguire s help. Who were these women?  Mr. Maguire wondered. We had no clue about them or that there was this jail here.  Curious, Mr. Maguire gathered up his brushes and persuaded Bayview officials to let him set up shop in the jail so he could paint elaborate oil portraits of 15 of the 141 inmates. Eventually, he also gave them brushes, a first for some, and a chance for all of them to paint snippets of the worlds they left behind and works still dreamed of.
The pictures the women came up with  innocent paintings, some as simple as a street corner in Washington Heights, a watch surrounded by the words Time is passing you by   are on display at White Box, alongside Mr. Maguire s portraits of the women.
Before, there was no connection between the art world and jail,  said Mr. Maguire, who has traveled the world from Belfast to Brazil, painting people living on the margins. Now there is a link, a reason to look up at them and to see these women as they are, just people, irrespective of whatever brought them to the jail. 
For some of the women featured in the show and the billboard advertising it, Mr. Maguire s brushes have given them keys to the world around them, a chance to emerge from Chelsea s shadow.

I m proud my face is one of the ones up there for people to see,  Elizabeth Cassarino, a former inmate, said as the show was preparing for its Nov. 9 opening. They need to keep it up there, and put one over at Bayview too. It shows who we are, that we re still people and we can enjoy art just like everybody else.  The crime that landed Ms. Cassarino in Bayview, and took her from her family and her job as a cabdriver, is history, she said, an argument with a gas station cashier who said she threatened him. She was sentenced on a charge of coercion.

At the request of the women, they are listed as anonymous artists, a courtesy, Mr. Maguire said, that is meant to keep spectators  eyes focused on their art and not their crimes. None of the work is for sale, by agreement between the gallery and state correction authorities.

But some have, in at least one way. Art is all that Ms. Cassarino, now a Chelsea gallery crawler herself, wants to talk about. My whole life has changed,  she said. Yes, she is doing the important things. She has a job, answering telephones at a radio station. She s surrounded herself with plenty of well-meaning friends and sometimes even going to the theater. But it is art, she insisted, that has made the difference in her life now. Hey eyes and words ignite with the enthusiasm of a child as she led a visitor, literally by the arm, on a personal tour of the seven paintings she has in the show.
It just showed me a different way to see myself, like my picture right here,  she said, moving to a portrait of a young woman wearing what is supposed to be an expensive dress. I could have that dress, my old cab, my family; whatever I painted became real. When you re locked up, you don t think people will see anything but that I was in Bayview. But I m more than that. 

Show: The Bayview Project
Publication: Newsday
Article/Writer: Empowered By Painting/ Fred Bruning

Craft. Color. Imagination. Excelence.
If art were athletics, the words would be stenciled on the locker room wall- exhortations from the coaching staff intended to bring out the player s best.
Brian Maguire, an Irish expressionist painter with a big reputation at home and a view of the human condition that is no less expansive, looked around the White Box Gallery on West 26th Street in Manhattan. Craft, color, imagination and excellence- Maguire s idea of what art demands- were in ample supply.

As a coach, Maguire 51, had succeeded, and probably as a human being, too.
It was like bringing water into sand,  said Maguire on a recent afternoon, thinking of the students who had produced the bold, bright works mounted on the gallery walls.

This year and last, Maguire taught art to 15 inmates of the Bayview Correctional Facility on West 20th street and 11th Avenue, a medium-security state women s prison with a population of more than 300  including 170 on work release  in what once was a YMCA catering to seamen.
He found the students eager, attentive, determined. They were locked up for various felony convictions  protective of the women, Maguire provided few specifics about their backgrounds  but, the artist noted, a criminal record leaves much unsaid. I ve never met a person where there wasn t something good about them. 

At Bayview, he said, his students proved an admirable bunch. They wanted to tackle something worthwhile, conquer boredom, gain a measure of control in an environment where they had little or none. In jail, noted Maguire, decision-making is not part of the daily routine.  Art is all the opposite. Stroke, tone, subject  the painter is the rule-maker, the guard and the warden. It is a very healthy thing to be involved in,  said Maguire.
Maguire, whose subjects include inmates of Northern Ireland jails and children of a favela, or shantytown, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, said he has no interest in rehabilitation.  That s not what I m after,  said the artist, who teaches at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. I m after education. 

He wanted to introduce the inmates to art  and, he said, make the art world aware of their existence.  For a long time, the art world  which has colonized much of the neighborhood around Bayview  had little contact with the prison, an anonymous brick building opposite the Chelsea Piers amusement complex. But Fergus McCaffrey, an independent curator at the Gagosian Gallery on West 24th Street, heard stories about women in Bayside whistling at men working at an art storage space across the street. It was a reminder that artists weren t the only ones in Chelsea.

The women had introduced themselves. Now, McCaffrey thought, the art world should return the favor. Maguire was a natural to serve as emissary.
He had a stellar reputation as teacher and practitioner  the Irish Times newspaper called him one of the country s most prominent and influential artists   and the temperament for the task. I was asked to make a bridge between art and the prison,  said Maguire in a subsequent conversation by phone from Dublin, where he lives. Maguire often paints on themes of alienation and isolation and has a keen interest in prisons, which, he thinks, provide a glimpse of the jailer as well as the jailed. It reveals how we care for the weakest and most vulnerable,  he said.

With funding from private foundations, the Irish government s Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism, and the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin (and some cash of his own), Maguire lived in New York  off and on  for a year and a half. He worked at Bayview for 17 weeks and conducted another project at Arthur Kill Correctional Facility in Staten Island. At Bayview, the artist hauled supplies with a rolling suitcase. He taught students the basics, encouraging them to trust their instincts and paint from experience. To shed light on what s in them,  he said.

Paint the most significant man in your life, he told the inmates. The most significant woman. Paint the place that made you happiest. The place that made you miserable. Paint the best day of your life. Paint the object you love most. They painted  and so did Maguire.

The Bayview Project  exhibition at the not-for-profit, socially conscious White Box combines Maguire s broad-stroked, unapologetic portraits of the women  four are featured on a billboard at the corner of 10th Avenue and West 20th Street  and the forthright and revealing acrylic paintings done by his students. Their work is a collective self-portrait,  Maguire said.
For a while, it looked as though the White Box show  which runs through Dec. 17  would be incarcarated itself.

Gallery officials said authorities at Bayview told them exhibitions of inmate art were barred by the state and demanded that the paintings be returned.
Earlier in the year, Glenn Goord, state correctional services department commissioner, canceled an annual prisoner art show in Albany that had been presented for more than three decades but that in 2001 drew criticism for including the work of a serial killer. Department spokesman James Flateau said Goord objected to the Albany exhibit because it depended on public funding and allowed inmates to sell their work, which the commissioner considered a slap in the face to crime victims,  though half of the proceeds went to a state victim s fund.

With the White Box exhibition now in jeopardy, the New York Civil Liberties Union contacted Goord. The rights group assured him that White Box sought no profit and that paintings would not be sold  and threatened a lawsuit unless the state cited its authority to ban an event in a private venue. In his reply, Goord said White Box was not in violation of policy, that the show could go on, and that he wished the exhibition success.
Flateau said corrections officials recognize the value of privately financed projects like Maguire s  to prisoners and, consequently, to the public. It s something positive they can be proud of, and work on, and develop a whole different head set than the one that led them to be in prison in first place,  Flateau said.
Maguire said the importance was clear to him, too. The worthwhileness was in the work that the women did,  he said.
The pictures  often simple and direct  differed from the material in neighboring galleries.
At White Box, there was no pink-and-aqua abstract that looked like the aftermath of a paintball skirmish, or king-size construction resembling a water slide, or arrangement of plastic cubes stuck to the wall in a shape vaguely suggesting Long Island.
For Maguire s students, reality came in more familiar shapes.
One inmate painted a man with cocoa-colored skin. He is surrounded by icons  money going into a bag, a bottle of gin, a pistol. The man is crying.
Another piece depicted a fellow with red eyes who appears to be tumbling  falling down or falling up,  observed Juan Puntes, director of White Box  while a woman, dressed in pink, waits in a doorway, a placid patch of blue in the background.
There was a pickup truck, lovingly rendered, by a woman from upstate New York  a pickup so true and inviting that a viewer might imagine taking a ride on a fine autumn day when the last leaves are falling and sun glances off the hood, and the breeze tickling through the window hints that winter is on the way.
The truck is the most important possession in her life,  said Maguire of the artist. He noted how the image of the vehicle was alone on the sheet. It fills the frame,  he said. There is nothing else. 
A few days later, one of the Bayview artists, Elizabeth Cassarino, 38, of Manhattan was at the gallery. Released from prison and enrolled in vocational training, Cassarino, upbeat, energetic and with a ready smile (her likeness is on the 10th Avenue billboard, first face on the left), conducted a tour of her pieces, complete with running commentary  emphasis on running. 
Cassarino screeched to a stop in front of her picture of the World Trade Center. A flag waved on top of one of the towers. I put a flag so that I shouldn t be sad,  she said. That what they did won t get me down. 
In the picture, too, was a person she calls Fashion Girl.  She is that girl, of course, said Cassarino  the girl with the long earrings and heavy makeup and the miniskirt and the Gucci bag. In real life, the Fashion Girl doesn t have a Gucci bag. No,  she said. I m trying to get one. 
Cassarino moved along. There was the picture of Bloomingdale s with big, cathedral-like arches, and the one of Coney Island with a giant crab on the beach and a shark in the water, and another of her old drum set. Finally, Cassarino stopped in front of a portrait of the women in her family. Notes drifted overhead because, Cassarino said, the women are all musical, even if that means, in some cases, that they once took hula lessons.
She looked hard at the piece. To me, it s like harmony,  she said.
On the phone, Maguire was told of Cassarino s high voltage enthusiasm. The artist said he could imagine. He said a few more words on prisons, about how, in his country, time behind bars does not necessarily foreclose a person s future. His impression is that it often is different here. In America, if you go to prison, that s almost it,  Maguire said.
For all people, he said, there is a need for hope. That was the lesson of Elizabeth Cassarino, Bayview alum, artist on exhibition, fashion girl still dreaming of a Gucci bag. She was the point, Maguire said. Elizabeth is the success of the project. 

Show: The Bayview Project
Publication: CNN.Com
Article/Writer: (Reuters)

NEW YORK -- When art handlers from trendy New York galleries first noticed women whistling at them from the small windows of a non-descript building, they had no idea it was a prison.

Once discovered, the little-noticed jail held a natural appeal for acclaimed Irish artist Brian Maguire, who had painted portraits of men in Brazil's most notorious prison and coaxed fine art out of jailed militants from both sides of Northern Ireland's bitter divide between Roman Catholics and Protestants.

Over a 17-month period starting last year, Maguire and 13 women prisoners in the Bayview Correctional Facility in New York told stories and painted oil canvasses in bright colors, portraying a mixture of sadness, fear and hope. Some of the works form part of "The Bayview Project" exhibition running through mid-December at White Box gallery on West 26th Street, just a few blocks from the prison, which incongruously coexists with the art scene that has sprung up in the last five years in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.

Maguire, a taut, gray-haired man with a lived-in face and guileless smile that charmed his prison pupils, said the first thing he did was ask pairs of friends in the 331-bed minimum security prison to paint each other. "They are all wearing these green boiler suits, but they used mauves and reds, and it just really struck me the brightness with which they viewed each other," Maguire said. With their consent, Maguire painted portraits of the women and encouraged them to pick up his brushes and oils and create paintings about their families, their fears and their hopes.

Whistling from windows Maguire would not have found the prison or negotiated with state authorities to work there if it had not been for fellow Irishman and curator Fergus McCaffrey. McCaffrey became aware of the prisoners because the art handlers and restorers working for the galleries "were getting whistled at by the girls" and his interest was piqued. "How many people in this community, this art world, are aware that there is a women's prison here and is there any way for the prisoners and the art world to interact?" McCaffrey asked himself. He called on Maguire, who had represented Ireland at the 1998 Sao Paolo Biennial, presenting paintings from his workshops in Brazil's biggest prison, Carandiru.

In October 1992 a riot at Carandiru turned into a massacre as military police were called in and 111 prisoners were killed. The prison was closed two months ago. Maguire has run art workshops in Belfast prisons with Catholic guerrillas of the Irish Republican Army fighting to end British rule in Northern Ireland. He also entered the world of pro-British Protestant guerrillas on the other side of the conflict, with imprisoned members of the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force taking part in his workshops.

The 12-year project was linked to the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. Some of the prisoners went on to complete degree courses in fine art. In Brazil, Belfast and most recently at Bayview, Maguire said he wanted to bring out the humanity in the prisoners, seeing them as people who change, separating the crime from the person who created the painting.

Anonymity

"I advise prisoners not to give their names in public while they are still exhibiting because mostly what happens is that the work is not reviewed, the crime that got them there is reviewed," Maguire said in an interview at the gallery. "Sometimes I am influenced by their way of painting. I have influenced them in their way of painting and then I allow them to influence me in my way of painting," said Maguire, who turned 50 last year.

Although none of the paintings by the inmates is signed, some have their handwriting. These range from place names daubed above the innocent, child-like image of the boardwalk at Brooklyn's famous Coney Island resort, to words that carry direct meaning. "Time...is Passin' you by Enjoy it!" the artist beseeches the viewer in words written next to a painting of a watch against a blue background.

Elizabeth Cassarino, one of the now-released women who took part in "The Bayview Project," embraced the workshop and the exhibition as just one of the things she has done to change her life after serving 18 months for attempted coercion. "I have a lot to be grateful for. The art was one of the most important things," Cassarino said, while proudly discussing her half-dozen paintings and Maguire's portrait of her hanging on the white walls of the small gallery.

The portrait, with strokes of red, pink, green, yellow, brown and black, is one of four displayed on a 20 feet by 60 feet street billboard on nearby West 20th Street to draw attention to the exhibition.

"Brian draws you the way the light hits you. ... He has a lot of colors in there," Cassarino, 38, said. "The forehead could have been bigger but everything else... You've got the crooked eyes, the crow's feet, the crooked nose, the thin lips, square jaw and he got the long neck and high cheek bones."

Earlier this year, the public display of prison inmate art almost didn't happen. New York State law prevents prisoners making money from art, but prison authorities agreed with the gallery to allow the exhibit because none of the art is to be sold and it will eventually be returned to the women.

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