“Now, if I had the wings of an angel,
Over these prison walls I would fly.”
So begins “The Prisoner’s Song,” made famous, though not written, by Vernon Dalhart, who sold more than a million copies of his recording of the lament in the mid-1920s.
Well, today the jailbirds may not be on the wing, but interest in their artwork is.
The annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners, widely regarded as the largest of its kind in the country and now in its 18th year, drew more than 4,000 visitors in 2012, the last year for which figures are available. The 2013 exhibition last month offered 430 works, with prices ranging from $20 to $400 by artists from 29 Michigan correction facilities.
There also are numerous online galleries that sell, or at least exhibit, prisoner art, not to mention the Maine State Prison Store on Route 1 in Thomaston, which features handcrafted items made by inmates.
But among antique collectors and auction-goers, the major interest is in prisoners’ woodwork, which began to appear in the early 20th century and is often referred to as “jailhouse carving.” Inmates today use other media, such as soap (although that is sometimes frowned upon because of its potential for forging keys and creating fake handguns) and cigarette wrappers, potato chip bags and other paperlike products.
But the use of wood scraps and other arboreal products, such as peach pits, dominates. Usually they are assembled into drinking establishments often populated with simians - “monkey bars.”
Last January, at a sale of furniture, fine art and decorative accessories, Pook and Pook, Inc. sold an 11-by-19-by-19-inch early 1900s scene by an unknown carver, of a tavern interior in a glass case with about a dozen (human) figures seated and standing, for $3,555.
The previous October, the Downingtown, Pa., auction house, which frequently deals in prisoner art, sold a similar but somewhat more detailed early 1900s bar scene by an unknown carver in a mahogany display case for $5,925. That was well above the $2,000 to $4,000 presale price estimate (possibly because it came from the estate of the well-known collector/dealer Robert J. Merritt. A group of eight anonymously carved hobo figures, also from the Merritt estate and expected to bring $600 to $900, went for $1,541.)
Bar scenes are not the only topic for jailhouse carvers. Ships and vehicles are also popular.
At a two-day sale last July in Philadelphia, Freeman’s sold a French prisoner-of-war-made model in bone of a galleon with three masts and 34 guns for $1,900, more than three times its presale estimate of $400 to $600. In April of 2010 in Burlington County, N.J., the auction company Legacies Old and New, Inc. liquidated the contents of a historic mansion, including a 3.5-by-4-foot model of the S.S. St. Paul, the steamship in which Marconi came over from Italy. It sold for $1,000, according to a subsequent account in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
It was built, also in the early 1900s, by an inmate serving a life term in the prison at Mount Holly, who made it out of scraps including pine (probably from a rafter), Bristol board from a book binding, and upholstery tacks and later presented it to the county sheriff. It was later put on display at the jail, itself a historic site.
And in January of 2009, Pook and Pook sold a rare jailhouse carving of a horse and carriage for $4,446 that was unique for a signature on it: Ed Walters, E. P. C2341. At the time, Ron Pook surmised that the number may have been that of the inmate, who was probably incarcerated in Berks County.
Whatever their subject, jailhouse carvers tend to be anonymous. There are two reasons.
One reason is that jailhouse carving is widely regarded as a subcategory of folk art. Once popular, the term “folk art” with its overtones of teutonic illiteracy, nowadays is yielding among academics to the more respectable sounding “traditional art”: customs, skills and beliefs handed down from one generation to the next by example or word of mouth. In other words: anonymous by definition.
The folk art category lives on among its descendant subcategories: “Primitive,” like Grandma Moses; “Tramp,” made by vagabonds also using found materials; “Self-taught” artists, such as Bill Traylor (1854 to 1947), whose gouache and pencil depiction of a purple cat sold for $40,625 at Freeman’s April 17 sale of American furniture, folk and decorative arts (almost twice its presale estimate of $15,000 to $25,000); and, more recently “Outsider,” currently celebrated at the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s exhibition through June 9 of the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz collection “Great and Mighty Things.”
The second reason is that anonymity is also a characteristic of jailhouse carvers themselves. With a few exceptions, being a jailbird is not a celebrity status.
One who emerged from anonymity was Patrick J. Culinane. In 1914 and 1915 while serving a sentence in a jail in Charlestown, Mass., he made a bar scene similar to those mentioned above but distinguished by being populated with monkeys - about 70 of them, according to an entry in “Henry’s Attic: Some Fascinating Gifts to Henry Ford and His Museum.”
Scattered about the bar, the figures were indulging in the activities that Culinane believed to have led to his downfall and that of his fellow prisoners: drinking and gambling. According to the entry, when the manager of a local Ford factory visited the prison, Culinane asked that the diorama be sent as a gift to Henry Ford, whom he greatly admired.
The admiration was mutual. Ford was so impressed he arranged for Culinane’s release and secured work for him at the Ford factory - making of him an honest man, husband and father of three.
The diorama is housed at the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., but in 1909 it was loaned to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore for a special exhibition titled “The Marriage of Art, Science and Philosophy.” There, visitors could see the plaque mounted on its back: … “a token of appreciation and esteem for his many and benevolent acts toward…prisoners” and signed “By a Prisoner.”
Culinane’s monkey bar is noteworthy for several reasons. It is one of the earliest of many monkey bar dioramas that followed. Invariably they showed figures engaged in one or more vices; and like them, some of its figures were made of peach pits.
Renewed interest in monkey bars was spurred in 2006 by an episode on the nationally broadcast Antiques Roadshow, during which Marybeth Keane, an appraiser from Connecticut, was asked to evaluate a monkey bar brought to her by a guest who said that, according to family history, it had been made by a convict at the New Hampshire Penitentiary in the 1920s. It had been in her family since the 1930s.
Keane said she knew of about 20 made by one or more inmates in the penitentiary, sometimes populated with frogs, more often with monkeys, and often carved from peach pits. She evaluated it at $3,500 to $4,500.
A local group that became interested in the appraisal was the Down Jersey Folklife Center at WheatonArts and Cultural Center in Millville in South Jersey (a region sometimes known as Down Jersey). It, too, had a monkey bar about the same size as the Antiques Roadshow specimen and also populated with figures carved from peach pits: one pit for the top half of the figure, the other pit for the bottom half.
Peach-pit carving is a well-established folk craft that may have first been developed in China. It is still pursued in the South Jersey area, although most local practitioners turn their peach pits into miniature baskets.
The center’s monkey bar origins are unknown. The peach pit figures were regarded as evidence that it, too, was of jailhouse origin, if not New Hampshire.
It was found in storage around the time the Folklife Center opened in 1995. It probably was later than the others, though before World War II, to judge from both its black-and-white checkered linoleum flooring and from the telephone booths and the floor-model radio that are included in the bar’s décor.
It also intrigued a visitor to the Folklife Center in 2009, particularly when he heard about the $3,500 to $4,500 Roadshow appraisal. He confided that he owned a box that also was an example of jailhouse carving. He had gotten it from his father, he said.
When asked where his father had gotten it, he replied, “He made it.”
David Iams is the former Auctions columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is also on the Friends of Folklife board at WheatonArts.