Exploring Faith Ringgold’s work through the topic of decarceration, summer interns Sofía Escobar Amaya and Emma Greene react to the MIFF 2024 documentary Paint Me a Road Out of Here.
Faith Ringgold’s Coming to Jones Road #4: Under a Blood Red Sky (2000) is on view in the gallery of modern and contemporary art at the Colby Museum. This summer’s iteration of the Maine International Film Festival at the Waterville Film Center included the film Paint Me a Road Out of Here, which told the story of one of Ringgold’s earlier works, For the Women’s House (1971). In view of this connection to an artist in the Colby collection, we went to see the film. Although we knew what drew us to watch it, by the end of the documentary we humbly admitted that we had been taken aback by the overarching theme of decarceration. Neither of us expected such a thought-provoking encounter. We talked about our first impressions the entire ride back, asked each other questions, and shared our preliminary reflections.
Immediately, it seemed fitting that the film should be shown in Maine, perhaps one of the states that would appreciate the mission of Ringgold and Baxter most. Maine’s prisons are incredibly progressive, with a focus on rehabilitation, rather than retribution, through education and art. As we came together to write, we realized that the story of the painting itself, For the Women’s House, made us draw connections to our classes at Colby, and to our individual (and very different) academic experiences—one of us being a physics major with a minor in cinema and the other studying art history and philosophy. Nonetheless, we found enough contact with major ideas about the problem of incarceration to reflect on the role that art plays in activism.
Summary
Paint Me a Road Out of Here follows a painting’s symbolic journey to liberation and the movement behind all those it has inspired. The painting, Faith Ringgold’s For the Women’s House, was meant to give hope to the incarcerated women of the New York Women’s House of Detention, where it was displayed for years, and was inspired by the first-hand conversations Ringgold had with its residents. The work depicts women employed in roles that were not traditionally held by women at the time: doctor, minister, professional athlete, bus driver, and president of the United States, among others. The painting was intended to hang in the prison, visible and bright, telling women not to give up.
The film takes us along on a journey to unfold the history of the painting. In Faith Ringgold’s research process, she found that incarcerated women, who are often young mothers or pregnant, had a lot more systematically stacked against them than she realized. These women were committing crimes in moments of complete desperation, often trying to provide for people or unable to escape the poverty and the disadvantage of communities they were born into. Fifty years pass, and we are introduced to Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, a woman fighting against the same disadvantages that women a generation ago were experiencing. Like many others, Baxter found prison a hopeless place, referring to it in the film as a “department of collections” rather than “department of corrections.” People are being punished rather than rehabilitated in these prisons, making the released persons 70% more likely to return to jail after their first sentence. Baxter, in her time of incarceration, was able to find hope in her own art, and at the same time she realized the significance of Ringgold’s. So, Baxter joined forces with Ringgold to make change for incarcerated and impoverished women—first, by liberating the painting itself.
The painting, For the Women’s House, lived a life in the prison that was oddly allegorical to the lives many of the women live in the prison—abused, unseen, whitewashed. The painting, meant to serve as a beacon of hope for the incarcerated women, was removed from the facility as it was converted to a men’s prison, washed over with white paint, and hidden in a storage room. With the help of a guard who saw the importance of the work, it was recovered and restored, but then hung up twenty feet high in a gym at another women’s correctional facility in Rikers Island, the Rose M. Singer Center, unable to be seen and appreciated, and imprisoned once again by plexiglass.
Once Ringgold learned of all abuses her painting had been subject to, she demanded it back. Baxter, learning of all that Ringgold stood for, and herself identifying with the mistreatment of the painting, teamed up with Ringgold in her fight. The film recounts Baxter’s redemption and success as an artist and her advocacy for reform of women’s prisons. We see her passion and conviction band conservators and administrators together, leading them to free the painting and display it in the Brooklyn Museum.
Emma’s Response
As I exited the theatre and into the light, I thought about how the topic of prison reform has followed me around these past couple of years. Over these past two years, I’ve visited three prisons total, and spoken personally to over thirty incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people. Through a Jan Plan class led by Brandon Brown, a formerly incarcerated Mainer who was able to earn his PhD throughout his sentence, and through programs I’ve participated in through my local church, I’ve been able to carry out conversations and experience what it’s like to walk through a prison.
The feeling I felt while watching this film is one that I’ve felt many times before—everyone is so wrong about who incarcerated people are and what they really deserve. Sometimes people are quick to dehumanize them, but in reality, many of them are just people who have made mistakes, just like any of us. Prison policies and preconceptions of prisons allow for easy mistreatment, punishing incarcerated individuals, rather than rehabilitating them. Everything is against them, as soon as they’re in prison, and as soon as they’re out.
Baxter’s experiences in prison horrified me, frankly. Giving birth for hours, chained to a table, unable to hold her child: these are experiences that don’t always lend themselves to redemption, but Baxter found it. And further, she found it in herself, a vow to work to not let this happen to any woman in prison again. Not only does she work tirelessly to make these changes, she works to bring art, bring hope, to women’s prisons.
When you listen to people who are so often silenced, real problems come to light, and progress can be made when led by empathy. I’ve listened to the stories of many incarcerated people, and every time I leave believing that these stories should be heard and these individuals should be treated better. Through Paint Me a Road Out of Here, director Catherine Gund allows everyone to listen—you can’t help but care after viewing this film.
Sofía’s Response
As I watched the journey of Baxter and the painting, and the almost unwillingness of prisons to make healthy progress, Angela Davis came to mind. It was only a few months prior that my philosophy professor assigned us the first chapter of Davis’s famous book on incarceration, Are prisons Obsolete?, for our weekly reading group. I mean, the connection to Ringgold seemed obvious: both are second-wave Black feminist figures, were active during the same time, and created work concerned (among many things) with the oppressive nature of the prison system. And sure enough, through Google search with both their last names, the artwork America Free Angela pops up. And with it, the realization that ideas don’t exist in a vacuum, which I knew, but didn’t really know.
I knew that Davis had gone to prison, and I knew she was a real person that did real activism. But, I saw both Baxter and Ringgold discuss their work, talk about their lives and the things they’ve done and why they’ve done them. The film made Davis’s work real—it humanized the incarcerated people that I had read about but never actually was able to experience.
The trouble with academic papers is that their format lets us forget that they were written by people. When I read Davis, she convinces me straight away, explaining that the prison system is obsolete, that it needs to be shut down, not reformed, and that we have been conditioned to think it is essential when it is only unjust, and I understand it. When I accept the argument, I do it because it is eloquent. But humanitarian issues are not academic theory, they are realities lived by people, and those realities are graphic and subjective.
I react to the film strongly. Do I react with my hard analytical brain? The same one I use to read intense philosophical abstractions? Or do I react with empathy? With that emotional intelligence that is equally important in informing our understanding of right and wrong? Paint Me a Road Out of Here director Catherine Gund has managed to provoke an emotion in me that informs my reading of Angela Davis’s philosophy. We can look at Faith Ringgold’s work and see it: this is where she was and why it matters. She has managed to humanize the painting. It is both a placeholder for every woman that’s been incarcerated and a symbol of empowerment and strength for those women. Its mere existence and trajectory is a critical reproach of an institution that continues to fail women, and it is also beautiful.
The realities lived by Ringgold and Baxter are stories of empowerment through art. For the Women’s House represents that healthy intersection between eloquence and empathy that we often find in channels of visual communication. A testimony from a previously incarcerated person and Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? are both important encounters to have with the social and political issue of incarceration. One is personal and emotional, the other one is fundamental and irrefutable. In For the Women’s House, they exist together, it is a raw experience as well as an idea.
—Sofía Escobar Amaya ’26, Summer 2024 Barringer Collections Intern and
Emma Greene ’26, Summer 2024 Museum Development Intern
Paint Me a Road Out of Here was screened at the 2024 Maine International Film Festival (MIFF) at the Maine Film Center. This 10-day festival brings together American and international independent films, highlighting in particular groundbreaking cinema from Maine and New England.