Street roots., June 30, 2017, Page 4, Image 4

News
Page 4
Street Roots • June 30-July 6, 2017
A new
gallery show
serves as a
glimpse into
the m inds o f
Oregon state
prisoners
They are
human
beings'
BY EMILY GREEN
S T A F F W R IT E R
avid Slader first laid his hands on a
painting signed “B. Pat” inside a
decommissioned jail, located in the
cellar of Coquille’s old city hall building.
The clown-like face painted with crushed-
candy pigment was as raw as it was
disturbing.
“It’s a window into a very troubled mind,”
Slader said. “And that’s what makes it so
powerful.”
Across the self-portrait was scrawled the
phrase “Human Being.”
It reminded Slader of an exhibit he’d seen
about three years earlier in New York City
at a folk art museum. It was a collection
created by the French artist Jean Dubuffet,
whose style was modeled after the works of
mental hospital patients and children.
Dubuffet coined the phrase “art brut” to
describe art created outside of cultural
norms and untethered by formal training.
“Much of the art brut work is from
mental patients,” Slader said. As he pointed
to B. Pat’s self-portrait, now lying on his
dining room table, he said, “As you can see,
this probably fits that criteria in some way.”
Slader had found the piece while rifling
through the remains of an inmate art show
called “Cries from the Cage,” which toured
Oregon in 2011.
He was looking for artists to showcase in
July alongside his latest collection of oil
paintings at Gallery 114 in the Pearl District,
and he thought Oregon’s prisons might hold
some promising talent.
An attorney-turned-artist, Slader spent
the last decade of his legal career suing the
Archdiocese of Portland on behalf of sex
abuse victims. But he remembered how in
his earlier days as a criminal defense lawyer,
an incarcerated client had paid him with
paintings of iconic African-Americans.
He Googled “Oregon prison art,” and it
led him to a website of the same name.
Bandon resident Victoria Tierney had
created the site to showcase and help sell
the work of incarcerated artists she’d
featured in an exhibit several years earlier.
She sent Slader to the old city hall building
in Coquille to select some items for the
show.
Tierney had suggested that Slader
consider artists Jerome Sloan and David
Drenth.
Sloan, an inmate at Snake River
Correctional Institution in Eastern Oregon,
skillfully draws photo-realistic portraits
D
P H O T O B Y E M IL Y G R E E N
The name o f David Slader’s inmate art show, “H um an B eing,” is inspired by a painting by
B. Pat, one o f the inmates whose art is featured in the show.
interwoven with objects, often clock parts,
and his own alphabet of symbols. His “Time
Series” will be featured at the gallery.
He uses proceeds from his art sales to
help support his son, who was born after he
was incarcerated. He described his series
as: “about how I look at time now. I now see
that time is about my family and how the
next generation will be better than me.”
Drenth is an Oregon State Penitentiary
inmate whose 5-foot long, brightly colored
murals incorporate cubism and metaphoric
surrealism.
The show, aptly titled “Human Being,”
kicks off July 5 with an auction from 6 to 8
p.m. to benefit the Oregon Justice Resource
Center, followed by its official opening on
First Thursday from 6 to 9 p.m.
Drenth spoke to Street Roots from
Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, where
he earned an associate degree in art
through Chemeketa Community College.
“Look at the art - look at how much hope
it’s given me,” he said. “I wouldn’t even be
talking to you if it wasn’t for the art.”
Drenth said he works about 40 hours
each week cleaning up the prison yard, for
which he earns $40 a month. It’s about the
same amount he spends on the art supplies
for each piece that he creates within the
walls of his 6-foot by 7 1/2-foot cell.
“A bag of coffee is $10, and pencils are
$1.39 each,” he said. “I have to make a
choice between my art supplies and if I want
to drink coffee.
"One of the reasons I started doing the
art,” he said, “is because I realized that
prison jobs don’t pay that much, so I am
going to have to somehow make more than I
am able to make in here to be able to
survive in here.”
Both Sloan and Drenth are serving life
sentences for their roles in murders that
occurred decades ago.
Drenth, 58, was 27 when he was
sentenced, and Sloan, 42, was 20. Neither
man pulled the trigger himself, but in
Oregon, anyone in a group that commits a
felony that results in a loss of life is guilty of
murder.
Time is a common theme in both their
work, whether an hourglass or ticking hands
of a clock.
“Sometimes it seems like time gets
skewed or distorted,” Drenth said. “I’m in
the same place for 34 years, and time isn’t
even real to me anymore.”
Tierney has met all three of the inmate
artists, and she said while Sloan and Drenth
“are more socially conscious,” B. Pat was
more inwardly focused.
“He’s a very troubled soul - he knows
he’s a very troubled soul. He’s done things
that he’s not proud of, and nobody would
be,” she said. “He is a man so extremely in
touch with his angst, with his suffering -
like he’s living in hell. And he expresses that
in such a way that it can be very moving.
“Strangely enough, he’s the one that’s out
of prison,” she said.
Alongside Sloan’s beautifully intricate
pencil portraiture and Drenth’s clean lines
and well-composed panoramas, B. Pat’s
creations, composed from shampoo, coffee,
toothpaste and whatever else he could get
his hands on, have a childlike quality.
See ART, page 5