Carol Newborg

“The arts should be accessible to all.”

I received an MFA from UC Berkeley in 1981 and have exhibited my work nationally and in Mexico and Iran. Bay Area exhibits have included the de Young Museum as part of an artist-in-residency, the Tides Foundation, and the SFMOMA Rental Gallery. I received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, among other awards and artist residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Dorland Art Colony, and Playa Summerlake.

Healing has been a part of my artwork since some of my earliest sanctuary installations 40 years ago to my newest series about the excessive and cruel long prison sentences in the US. I make work to connect with others and to experience the physicality of making art, often with repetition of forms and process, which gives me a sense of repair and healing. During covid, I started understanding more about my family’s history during the Holocaust, and how it affects me and creating work about that, which can help me and hopefully others. From the original community arts work I did at Creative Growth 45 years ago, through almost 40 years of working with art in prisons, I have learned and been inspired by how making art can help people to process hurt and harm and to grow and be nurtured through art.

Since 2010 I have been Program Manager, Open Studio teacher and exhibit organizer for the San Quentin Prison Arts Project through the William James Association. I organized many San Quentin art exhibitions, readings, panels and events at Alcatraz, the SF Public Library, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Opera and area colleges and art centers.

Sentences

A series of work honoring formerly incarcerated individuals for their years in California prisons.

This series grew out of my frustration and anger at witnessing the excessive long sentences that people often serve in the California prisons. I’ve worked inside with Arts in Corrections programs since 1983, and have been very privileged to witness the true healing nature of art for so many individuals, but have been continually saddened and upset by seeing so many people locked up and hidden away from us; people who have often done much hard work to understand and process their traumatic backgrounds and the trauma they’ve caused others.

As I worked with my original idea of honoring the years of time served, I experimented with images of repeated forms. This led to a series of drawings and paintings of teardrop shapes. They were based on a tattoo tradition I saw when I was new to prison arts teaching- a line of teardrops, one for each year served.

Eventually, I realized wire was the appropriate medium for the background and support- and that covering it with soft fabrics and yarns was a soothing and healing process for me. I now use a grid cut from metal fencing as the support structure, and wrap and soften it with different types of textiles. I make the ‘teardrops’ in a variety of rounded shapes, then I gather pieces of silk, yarn, and such from my boxes and start wrapping, braiding, wrapping some more, sewing a bit, and just letting myself wrap and cover the metal.

While there is much joy, creativity, humor and a true sense of community in the art studios and other classes inside, there are of course many stresses and tensions, sadness and other negative conversations and experiences there. And I’ve finally realized that it helps me to work some of that out in making my art, and in honoring people who have done so much deeply challenging hard work to be where they are today.