NEW YORK, NY.- Featuring artists Faith Ringgold and Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Paint Me a Road Out of Here uncovers the whitewashed history of Ringgold’s masterpiece, “For the Women’s House,” following its 50-year journey from Rikers Island to the Brooklyn Museum in a poignant, funny and true parable of a world without mass incarceration.


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Synopsis

In 1971, artist Faith Ringgold created a monumental painting “For the Women’s House” for the women incarcerated at Rikers Island jail. Fifty years later, artist Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, who gave birth in prison 15 years ago, finds herself banding together with an eclectic group of activists, politicians, artists, corrections officers and Faith Ringgold herself to free the artwork with the ultimate goal of freeing the women. Paint Me a Road Out of Here is a wild tale of the painting’s whitewashed journey and the two artists who challenged the same powerful and oppressive institutions, a half century apart, with their artwork, their voices and their shared, persistent goals.

Director’s Statement

On December 15, 2021, I first encountered Faith Ringgold’s painting “For the Women’s House” in the Rikers Island jail complex with a group of advocates examining the state of the facility. I had no idea the painting was there. I barely knew it existed. I had not anticipated that it would open a portal for me to see grave and moral lessons so clearly. I thought about what is seen, who is watched, who isn’t, who gets to see things. The painting was not being seen despite being created explicitly for incarcerated women to engage with it. Incarcerated people live under complete surveillance, simultaneously visible to those who control the inside but blocked from those on the outside.

In the carceral system, the panopticon is alive and well. For women and gender-expansive people, even more so. The bodies of women and gender-expansive people are subject to the male gaze not only on the street but in the museum as well, which affirms and perpetuates the exploitation of subjugated

bodies both inside and outside the carceral system. This treachery often leads people to incarceration in the first place, and then again and again as the cycle spirals around its own making, sentencing many to a life of surveillance and control. How filmmakers can make the invisible visible is a constant and welcome provocation. Engaging history, relationships and artistry, among other elements, my production team and I embarked on both manifesting and sharing a parable of great simplicity, vitality and importance.

Faith Ringgold has said, “The women wanted to be free, they wanted to be out of there of course but it was obvious to me that the reason many of them were there was because they had a lack of freedom in the first place. They were arrested for doing things for other people.” So Faith painted them a story about things even women on the outside couldn’t be: doctor, minister, professional athlete, bus driver, president of the United States. She broke down the wall between inside and outside, unifying women in a dream beyond freedom, past survival, giving purpose and meaning to life, in a world without walls, without insiders and outsiders, a place that includes joy and peace, a place where everyone’s contributions are not only possible, but where those contributions matter.

Before we had even left the jail complex, the group of us who had seen the artwork set about continuing the struggle to “pave the women a road out” of the jail. Faith’s painting was being treated like the incarcerated women — unseen, undervalued, discarded for another time — and we saw the opportunity to revive her effort. A community of accountability, Faith and other artists, prison officials, the mayor’s office, philanthropists and activists, all came together to invite a contemporary artist to work with the women and gender non-conforming people housed at Rikers to make a new artwork that carries on that struggle. In the meantime, we worked to move the painting off the Island and introduce it to a new audience — a broad public — to access its message and be motivated to fight for the freedom of incarcerated people. The hip-hop and multi-media artist Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter was commissioned to create a new piece with people incarcerated today, fifty years after Faith’s original vision. And “For the Women’s House” was loaned to the Brooklyn Museum for the time being.

I aspire to make artwork in the tradition of celebrating transformation, inspiring healing and motivating change. Access to making and engaging with art forms, narrative change and critical thinking is the material for any road to justice, no

matter how long the road may be. In my most recent collaboration, the short documentary Angola Do You Hear Us? Voices from a Plantation Prison, the incendiary artwork is Liza Jessie Peterson’s one-woman play “Peculiar Patriot.” Liza’s engagement with men incarcerated at the Angola Prison terrified the most oppressive forces of the carceral system and led the guards to shut down her performance halfway through. The men inside were fired up. They engaged family and friends on the outside who then voted to activate the changes the men needed to get themselves free. Since the performance and our short documentary, over 400 men have gone home from Angola. Art has the power to activate and provoke real change.

Across decades, the collaborations among artists Faith Ringgold and Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter and different women and gender-expansive people incarcerated at Rikers Island jail provoke vital questions. What does their artwork tell us about humanity, value and justice? How does the relocation of Faith’s original painting from the jail to the museum further the process of resistance, opening space for Mary to carry on the struggle of becoming free? Our film is a dialogue between Mary and Faith, two artists whose practices, artworks and life experiences show us how the institution of the museum can’t contain resistance to the criminal legal system. They make collaborations, quilts, hip hop videos, children’s books and murals painted on canvas with the intention of public, community engagement rather than interrogations for gallery walls. They challenge viewers to consider how artwork is connected to the safe, healthy and just world we all want to live in.


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