CONDEMNED

In Paintings: Life, Death, Carcerality, and the Pursuit of Abolition

A series of artwork created on Death Row.

by OBIE WEATHERS

This piece has one foot in the past and one in the future as it comes from my work with a class in UC Santa Barbara. This was my first time working with a class with the tablet I was issued in December. I am trying to juxtapose the low technology of the solitary confinement cell with the high tech of a tablet. The criminal legal system is posing as if it's making sweeping reforms, but it's all undermined by the continued practice of archaic forms of control like solitary confinement and capital punishment. We have to be very skeptical of these so-called reforms and not rest and think of them as an end.

They come as a result of the calls from the public that this system treats people with dignity because that's why the public funds this system. Then there's this interaction I'm having with the Literatures in Juvenile Justice class via the tablet. The class is a movement towards a future where justice for youth has truly just outcomes. But I'm having this interaction while I'm under a sentence of death that has been justified in part by my experiences as a youth and my encounters with the criminal legal system during those tender years.

Being sentenced to death and held in solitary for two decades is a type of underground existence.

The title comes from Ryan Flaco Rising who created the Underground Scholars support program in the University of California for system-impacted people to help them with their education goals. Being sentenced to death and held in solitary for two decades is a type of underground existence. And scholarship is one thing I've been up to down here and hope to continue to find the support needed to move forward.

Imagine if all the money the state was paying to hold me in this cell and potentially execute me went instead towards educating me when we know that education reduces recidivism rates.

When I shared this one with my siblings here, some of them said:

"That's not how we take bird baths!"

And of course they are right. But I don't think most of the bathers in art history took baths in the poses they were depicted in. So with this one, I'm following along with that tradition: the idealized and posed figure. But I'm introducing a person of color into a canon of mostly, if not all, white figures. Women, at that. Pure and perfect, not flashing their trauma. And you know, that seems to be a requirement for a Black person to be seen. 

Bird baths are simply ways for prisoners to bathe while locked in a cell without access to a shower. Sink, a bit of soap, and maybe a rag is all that's needed. We have had to take many of these as of late due to staffing shortages afflicting prisons across the nation. At a time when remaining clean is a matter of life and death.

What makes this figure idealized is its externalized trauma. In our struggles for a better life free of unnecessary trauma, Black people have to prove that we suffer.

With this painting, I could have depicted this figure closer to the reality of what a bird bath actually looks like for us here, but I question whether it would actually bring anyone closer to this reality. In using an idealized and posed figure, I am keeping the reality the figure represents obscured in the same spirit that prisons work endlessly to keep the reality of the prison within it swalls—out of the public's view.

And perhaps the public doesn't want to see the reality inside these walls? Or at least not a large enough public to make a significant change in the lives of the millions locked up in the United States. 

What makes this figure idealized is its externalized trauma. In our struggles for a better life free of unnecessary trauma, Black people have to prove that we suffer. We have to have proof of an absent father or an abusive mother who beats us. There has to be some sexual abuse, and gangs, and drugs and alcohol, and underfunded schools in our wrecked childhoods. This is how we become worthy. This is our path towards an affirmed humanity, climbing the phrenological ladder.

This is not to say that some of us—if not most around me—locked in these cells bird bathing have not caused serious harm. We have. I know I have, and it's not excusable. Neither is intentionally obscuring our humanity. 

There is something else to this painting: it is from the perspective of someone inside the cell—not someone looking in. There is self-reflection happening. In that self-examination, there is something of a cleansing taking place; healing and making a whole, perhaps after a reckoning. Also, the figure isn't focused on the viewer, but engrossed within himself. Something deeply spiritual is happening in this dark place. This is something that takes place more than the public is allowed to know. 

There is a bit of mystery and even hope to this painting.

This painting developed as I processed my thoughts and painful emotions around the murder of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old boy from the west side of Chicago.

During the creation of this work, I thought about the many ways excessive force is used on children like Adam—children like me. I also considered the many ways that our lives are erased often before, during, and after breath is snuffed from our bodies.

Children like Adam and I often end up in deadly encounters with the criminal legal system because our lives have been largely discounted and caricatured. Even after the video of Adam's murder at the hand of police was made public, there were voices asking such questions:

Why did he have a gun?
And why was he out so late? 

Bypassing the fact that having a gun, being out late, and being underage does not justify executing someone, and even skipping past the fact that the video shows Adam did not have a gun when he was fired on, what should have been asked was: If he did—at some point—have a gun, why was a gun attractive to a boy in this country? And why didn't he have some other place to be hanging out at?  

A simple response to these questions would be: because we don't invest in the lives of kids like Adam. When I was Adam's age, I didn't have any safe places to go play and do exciting things kids at that age do. My neighborhood was dangerous and so my parents kept me close to the house, as best they could. The only park in my neighborhood was off-limits, per my parents.There were no cultural or arts center nearby. A lot of my peers at the time joined gangs. It seemed to be something to do with their energy and creativity in the desolate environment. Plus, our parents were too poor for things like summer camp. 

Just like that, we went from being little boys to being a danger to our community. We were now being watched and controlled. 

While in seventh grade, as a prank and to look cool for my friends, one morning before school I made a silly choice. My friends and I had walked to a corner store near the school to buy candy. At a payphone there, I dialed 911 and told the operator there was a bomb in the school. I had no sense of how irresponsible this was or how scary it might be for everybody at school that day. I didn't mean any harm. However, the campus police officer saw it another way: a friend and I were arrested that cold day in the early 90's for terroristic threats. We were booked into the Bexar County Juvenile Detention Center and locked in cells. And just like that, we went from being little boys to being a danger to our community. We were now being watched and controlled. 

When I was locked in that cold cell that night, hungry and eating toothpaste, I used my little fingers to pull myself up the ledge of the window and look out into the night. I was a little boy who had never been away from his family. I missed them.  

When I learned of Adam's murder, it broke my heart. It is very hard for me to think about Adam and not cry. I know this is because of his age and the way that his juvenile behavior was weaponized against him and ultimately used to justify his murder. This happened to me, too. When I stood trial for capital murder just six years after that first arrest for terroristic threats, the prosecutor pointed to that charge as proof that I needed to be put to death. And no one then stood up in the courtroom and said: "Hey! I object! That was just a little kid! He wasn't a terrorist! He didn't have the means nor the know-how (let alone the malicious intent) to commit an act of terror! He was a boy!" 

We are not afforded a childhood. We are whatever the fears in the American psyche contort us into at any given moment.

When I saw the way people seemed to be trying to place Adam's murder in his own hands, I felt sorrow. I still feel sorrow because this tendency in our society continues on. When Kyle Rittenhouse, a seventeen-year-old boy who was out late, had a gun, and even killed some folks, was arrested, Donald Trump, Jr. said: "We all do stupid things when we're 17." But this doesn't seem to be the case for children like Adam and me. We are not afforded a childhood. We are whatever the fears in the American psyche contort us into at any given moment. A boy who was given, at best, 75¢ a day for spending money from his parents becomes a terrorist. A boy running from a grown man who is trained, armed, and possesses the right to kill becomes an immediate threat.

There are many forms of excessive force used against people like us. Not just bullets, but also harsh sentences like life without parole and death sentences. Solitary confinement, too. When I think about my life and where I've been for the past 20 years (in a solitary cell on Texas' Death Row), I see it all as excessive force. All justified through narratives which erase who we are. We are not threats. We are not terrorists. The problems our lives are said to symbolize are not solved by bullets to our brown chests and lethal injections into our Black flesh. What we need is to have our lives invested in.

Unfortunately, there is a past that has yet to finish passing. With this painting, I return with another Black figure existing, like all Black subjects, in the wake of colonialism and slavery. 

During the weeks of creation, I struggled greatly with a desire to intimately touch another human body. I have very little sexual experience, and as I approached age 40 within my twentieth year in solitary while sentenced to die, I was overwhelmed with the real possibility of dying either by an intentional lethal injection or in a cell. In a cell, after many decades, by so‐called natural causes. Here, that means death by medical neglect, limited food options—which is also neglect—and the stresses imposed on a body from exposure to such an environment.

The figure, who sports my part in his hair, is positioned the way Buddha is often depicted as he died: reclining on his right side, right hand under his head. As I contemplated my proximity to death, with this painting as the residue of that thought, I came to understand that the way colonialism maimed or removed limbs as punishment is with us today through the policies and systems in place that make it possible for human beings to be literally cut off socially, physically—for decades, for life—to death.

When I notice the hips of this figure, I see my reaching out with longing for a body that is not my own. This painting, like nearly all my paintings with Black figures, is autobiographical.

And in the same way that chattel slavery claimed the right to determine life or death for its property, so does the ideology of a criminal legal system—worse so when it maintains a death penalty.

Again: there are pasts that are still passing. 

At the time of creation, yoga and meditation—a couple of my usual tools of coping—seemed useless. No matter how much I tried, these mechanisms did not help me work through the need to touch and be touched after over twenty years of not receiving intimate touch. When I notice the hips of this figure, I see my reaching out with longing for a body that is not my own. This painting, like nearly all my paintings with Black figures, is autobiographical. The hips exist  not as a fact at any point in time in my material reality, but in the space of my imagination—a place where the captive often flees so much from painful existence that it becomes automatic, and often a permanent state. This can have dangerous consequences for those held in perpetual solitary where they are denied the human necessity of constructing and confirming reality with others.

Fortunately, I have not gone in and lost my way back out. However, I do slip into the space of my imagination and do things unconsciously, as in the case of the way I painted the legs and hips of this Black figure with my bare hands.

As this Black figure lies on the steel bunk of a solitary cell, a collection of Buddhas at his feet on the desk, there was also playing in my mind the letters I have received over the years from people saying I should just "shut up and die." That I have no right to bemoan my horrible conditions because at least I can breathe—something that's not true for my victims. I considered this, the fact that my victims cannot touch and be touched beyond the grave. And the inconsolable grief of their loved ones still with us. I simply allow space, as best I can in the cramped space of this cell, for these voices, as well as mine, to be heard.

I dedicate this painting to my friend Mariell who has long supported my creative nature. Thank you.

This painting begins with a postcard I received featuring a picture of a wood sculpture of Guanyin of the Southern Sea—the Bodhisattva. This sculpture is dated somewhere within the 11th or 12th century. The Bodhisattva's pose exuding ease served as the general reference for the pose we find another Black subject captured in within another barren cell. This million dollar barren cell is just as much the subject of this painting as the colorful, life-filled Human we see in the pose of one known as a compassionate helper of others. And yet, the endless millions spent on endless cells like quicksand pits mire millions of bodies with the potential to heal while the cells go on selling us only the illusion of security.

If prison cells were the hulls of ships, they would sail us nowhere. A sad fact is that if the United States hasn't been able to incarcerate crime out of existence, we won't ever be able to.

When I was arrested on the 15th of February in the year 2000, two million people had already entered America's carceralverse. At the time, I was but eighteen and couldn't then imagine the potential within me to write, think, paint—to be loved and to give love. That took time—decades and much support from others. We might call them Credible Messengers—men who looked like me, talked like me, and with whom I had a lot of similarities. Only they had metabolized much of that shared or similar experience and patched up their wounded humanity. And because they had accomplished this difficult work they could now pass down to me the blessing of their wisdom-medicine.

This painting is a plea for those who remain: may we invest in the technology of mentorship; may we invest in the humans who can and who want to help heal, but who are being held in cages incapable of investing in others.

It wasn't until I met my friend Ryan Flaco Rising that I learned this language of the Credible Messenger. I'd seen it over the course of my experiences and exchanges with others on death row. I'd seen it in Chris when he talked about mentoring youth, when he said in so many words that in order to help others heal one needs the insight of empathy to help the healer guide their medicine to the precise mark within the other's heart. Support groups are so powerful because people with similar experiences and a collective understanding of certain catastrophes can walk others out the craters to a better place. And yet, for some strange reason we don't widely recognize that people snared in cycles of criminalized behavior can also benefit from the support of those who have clawed their way out of those very same cycles. Not only do we not widely recognize this, but we execute the very people—such as Chris Young—who could have provided many practical maps out of these sad cycles. This painting is a plea for those who remain: may we invest in the technology of mentorship; may we invest in the humans who can and who want to help heal, but who are being held in cages incapable of investing in others.

---