Besides being married to each other, Ashley Lucas and Philip Christman both work for the Prison Creative Arts Project at the University of Michigan, which brings students and faculty together with people in prisons and treatment programs for artistic collaborations. Believed to be the largest prison arts program in the world, serving 30 adult facilities and four juvenile facilities in Michigan, the PCAP offers programs in theater, visual arts, and creative writing. Each year it trains about 160 university students and volunteers to lead art-making programs in prisons.
What are the major parts of the Prison Creative Arts Project?
Ashley: One large project, which is our largest public face and that deals with all 30 prisons in Michigan, is a visual arts exhibit. Last year we displayed 617 works of art by currently incarcerated artists. Professional curators, students, faculty, and other volunteers—including some formerly incarcerated artists—go into all of Michigan’s prisons to meet with artists, talk about their work, select the art, and bring it back to campus, where we hang it and make it available for sale.
