The Ultimate Insider Art
Six artists gathered as they normally did on a Thursday night last January, around 6:30, ready to sculpt. They wore white cotton: V-neck shirts with short sleeves, and track pants with “TN DEPT OF CORRECTIONS” descending their legs. They had prepared hot chocolates in polystyrene cups for their teachers. But they were running late, and the drinks were getting cold.
The teachers — Robin Paris, Tom Williams, and Barbara Yontz — briskly made their way through the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution compound, accompanied by a young security guard with a short mohawk who was gobbling a muffin. Yontz pressed a large plastic container filled with art supplies against her chest. They passed security checkpoints, electric gates, heavy doors, buzz cut lawns, and a pale blue door lit from above — the execution chamber. “I don’t ever go in there. It freaks me out,” the guard said suddenly, her mouth full of muffin. “It smells like death, for real.”
They arrived at a windowless annex with fluorescent lights, polished floors, and a wheezing industrial air conditioner. The artists and teachers sat around a large white table. Each man took a baseball of white clay from the container and, without instruction, began pulling it to pieces.
Harold Wayne Nichols, a pale, balding 57-year-old, focused on his clay through dark-rimmed bifocal glasses, working it into a bust of a bald eagle, then gently pressing a blue pen lid into the head to give it a feathered texture. The bird was elegant and precise, as if Nichols were working from a biological illustration.
Donald Middlebrooks sat to his right, a bald, heavyset man of 55, with long fingernails that became caked and yellow with clay as he sculpted. He rolled small pieces of clay into balls, flattened them into thick discs with his thumb, and stacked them like pancakes. “I’ll be walking and it’s like, boom, I’ll get a good idea. It jumps out. That’s why I’m sitting here playing with this dough. I’m waiting for something,” he said, speaking slowly, with drawn-out vowels.
For nearly 90
