This session is made possible by the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. To learn more, visit our Partners page.

From January 5th to February 19th, 2024, President Lincoln's Cottage (PLC) in Washington, D.C., in collaboration with the Justice Arts Coalition (JAC), hosted a groundbreaking exhibit titled "Prison Reimagined: Presidential Portraits Project" (PR3P). Although PR3P is not the first exhibit of artwork and essays created by incarcerated people at an American museum or historic site, the exhibit is the first of its kind conceived, curated, and organized entirely by a team of incarcerated individuals—the Committee of Incarcerated Artists and Writers (CIAW) housed at Nash Correctional Institute in North Carolina.

This session, presented by members of the PLC interpretive team and the CIAW, will explore the challenges and opportunities that arose during the process of collaborating with the JAC and the CIAW and present the lessons learned during that collaboration.

Specifically, session participants will reflect on the experience of communicating directly with the members of the CIAW through the messaging app "Getting Out", which allows incarcerated individuals to communicate with their friends and loved ones on the outside. Foregrounding this type of radical communication throughout the exhibit development process allowed PLC staff to cultivate a pan-institutional interpretive practice that centered the voices of our community collaborators, strengthened our relationship with our community "heartners", and created a more meaningful experience for our visitors.