Lynn Cazabon's Portrait Gardens on Light Rail Trains

Wed, 19 Nov 2014 10:16:23 -0500
art, digital, gardens, incarceration, photography, portraiture, storytelling, women

Portrait Garden is a series of audio and photographic portraits of eleven women incarcerated at Maryland Correctional Institute for Women in Jessup, MD, culminating a 1-1/2 year long collaboration between Ruby Award winning artist and Associate Professor of Visual Arts Lynn Cazabon. In the collaboration the inmates created perennial gardens on the prison grounds consisting of plants chosen to represent each woman, and Professor Cazabon recorded interviews with each about the selected plants and her past and present experiences with gardening. The completed portraits are photographs of the selected plants that were planted and cultivated over the course of a year, displayed with a short textual excerpt from the audio interviews and QR codes, which when scanned with a mobile device, play the full interview with each woman. The complete set of images and audio interviews are available through the project website: http://portraitgarden.org

For the month of December, Portrait Garden will be displayed as a series of 100 posters in trains within the Baltimore Light Rail system. This public dissemination is conceived as a moving gallery designed to bring the women metaphorically into the community of Baltimore City.