How Art Is Being Used to End Overincarceration
Agnes Gund made waves last year when she announced that she was using $100 million from the sale of Roy Lichtenstein’s 1962 painting Masterpiece, which used to hang in the dining room of her Park Avenue apartment, to fund a new initiative aimed at criminal justice reform: She would make grants with funds raised through the sale of artworks with the goal of lowering mass incarceration by 20 percent over the next five years in target states with high prison rates.
Inspired in part by concern for her own African-American grandchildren, Gund teamed up with the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors to make contributions to organizations that work to solve problems related to mass incarceration-and she brought friends.
Early in the process Gund drafted a group of high-powered donors including Laurie M. Tisch, -Kathryn and Kenneth Chenault, Jo Carole Lauder, Daniel S. Loeb, Brooke and Dan Neidich, and others to commit funds of $100,000 or more raised from selling artworks to the cause. By November 2017 they had already given away $22 million in grants. Here, Gund and Ford Foundation president Darren Walker discuss the thinking behind the Art for Justice Fund, the issues it’s addressing, and the very personal nature of the project for its founder.
Darren Walker: The idea for the Art for Justice Fund came about because you have always had a passion for issues of justice and fairness, and because you have been interested in racial justice in this country.
Agnes Gund: I grew up with a woman named Henrietta Gibbons, who was a cook for us for years while my mother was sick. My siblings and I all began to go off to boarding schools, because she was supposed to die any second after she had the last of us. My sister Louise was just two when she was told my mother had six months to live. She lived for eight years. Henrietta was the only person I ever knew well-
DW: Who was African-American?
AG: Who was African-American. The thing that I remember most about her, besides her cooking and her refusal to let us have an extra cookie in between meals, was that she was so excited about President Truman winning. She was dancing around the kitchen sort of yelling, and I knew he was going to win. I knew that it wasn’t going to be Dewey. And Dewey was, of course, my father’s choice, and it was very exciting to see someone who was very enthusiastic about Truman’s win. Henrietta came from a part of Cleveland that was called Hough, and there was lots of looting and trouble in Hough, because it had always been a segregated part of Cleveland.
DW: Like many people of your generation, you grew up in a segregated city.
AG: Yes, very much so. Shaker Heights, which now is almost half black, then had no black people in it. So I didn’t really know many black people until I had my grandchildren, and I really began to understand much more about what was happening in this other world-thank goodness, not happening to them.
DW: So your children married, or partnered with, African-Americans?
AG: Yes, and had these four children. And then my youngest daughter adopted two children from Jackson, Mississippi, which I visited sometimes when the children were born. It was very much more of a Southern town than I had ever been to, even though Cincinnati, as you know, is right across the border from Kentucky. Until the late 1950s Cincinnati had segregated movie -theaters, which I, of course, hadn’t experienced, because that wasn’t the case in Cleveland.
DW: But then, when you went away to Miss Porter’s, you were in a different world. You were not in Cleveland anymore.
AG: But I was also not in a world that had any black people in it, and that was always sort of strange for me, because we really were separated.
DW: Well, you were like many privileged people: You just assumed things were the way they were. Then it really was through your own lived experience of your children marrying or partnering or adopting children that you also came to see through their eyes.
AG: Oh, I did. And I became much more acutely aware of the injustices that were going on in the world, which were the killing or the apprehension of people who really weren’t guilty of anything, or shooting them in the back when they were running away-people who haven’t done anything but have a taillight out.
And I began to think about how white people have the same drugs, if not more of them, and they don’t get put into prison for having a bunch of marijuana in their pocket, and black people do. And then they’re identified as criminals, and they’re not criminals. And yet if these people can’t pay bail, sometimes they’re asked to commit to pleading guilty because they’ll get a lesser sentence by doing so.
I think the whole system around bail and around plea bargaining and around having to stay in places like Rikers Island isn’t a humane way to treat people. And it’s mostly black people that are treated that way. There was a very startling picture of a black man in the New York Times. He was saying how he had been put in jail at the very same time as a white guy, with the very same punishment, and everything was the same about their situations, and when they came up for parole the white man got parole and the black man did not. They were absolutely similar in many ways: same age, same crime, same record of being in prison. It just shows you so plainly how there is a difference between how justice is served.
DW: And you decided you needed to do something about it?
AG: You were the first person I went to when I decided I would sell this painting. I had to get the money to do something, and you were very positive about it. The Ford Foundation had given many grants to justice-related initiatives that it was interested in, and you offered to help do the research on these projects and send some of the people working at Ford to help decide what kinds of organizations the money should go to, and what part art would play in this, which is very interesting to me.
DW: We have been friends for many years, and I have always been inspired by your commitment to social progress and to building a fairer and more just society. It’s something you’re fundamentally committed to. It’s something that is so imbued in your character, the idea that we have injustice in society and we have to address it so that America can really be America.
What was brilliant about this idea was your reliance on the thing you know best, which is the arts, where you’re not only one of the country’s greatest collectors and philanthropists but where you have real expertise. And so, by bringing together your passion for the arts and for justice, the idea of this fund emerged from you. The Ford Foundation supported your vision in creating the manifestation of that. We’re seeing that with the first round of grants that are supplying funding.
AG: The grants are in large categories, which we decided on by considering the things we wanted to affect. One was that we would like to lessen the population of black people going to prison by 20 percent.
DW: The categories of the $22 million of grants are addressing the objective of reducing the population of nonviolent people in prison, and in order to achieve that objective we have to work on the drivers of overincarceration in America. And that requires working on bail reform, working on reducing mandatory sentencing for nonviolent offenders-
AG: Which [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions came out with right away: He said he wanted to put back mandatory sentences on people without having any reason to do it.
DW: We are also working on prosecutorial reform and then the issue of the arts in prison, because the impact of the arts on people, as you know from Studio in a School and other programs, can really be profound. And, finally, recidivism, because one of the reasons for overincarceration is that people return to prison at very high rates, and they return because there are no reentry supports for them.
AG: Right now there’s something called “ban the box.” There’s a box on job applications that asks if you have a criminal record, and that obviously doesn’t help to get people to look at what someone is really capable of doing. Some people have learned, terrifically, skills in prison, or had skills before they went in that really qualified them to get a job, and they can’t get it when they have a criminal record scribbled all over their application.
Different ways of helping prisoners already exist, but they need to get bigger and better known. There are people who are really interested in this and doing something about it, but one thing that irritates me is that some people who are very conservative in their political thinking want to get rid of nonprofit prisons. They’re doing it because they’re libertarians, and they really believe in getting the government out of our lives. They don’t care about what it’s doing to people, how it’s so oppressive. You look at some of these prisons, and how people exist in them, and you think, this is cruelty beyond.
I mean, if someone is in prison, that’s one thing, but if they’re in a terrible prison where they’re raped and beaten… I think places like that shouldn’t exist. Rikers is a perfect example of something that has really disturbed me, as it has many people, because people commit suicide when they’re there-and they’re often young people who have been put in prison and haven’t even been given a trial, so who knows if they should be in prison at all?
So part of the purpose of the Art for Justice Fund is aiming at things like getting rid of Rikers, and there are a lot of people out there who are already working on that.
DW: We know the people in Rikers are there because they can’t post bail, and they can’t post bail because they’re poor.
AG: They don’t have the money. They have nobody they know who does have the money. Many white people can just call their father to come down and pay the money to get them out of jail, so they never even encounter something like Rikers, which, from the sound of it, would frighten me half to death to go there.
DW: You sold a Lichtenstein painting and donated the proceeds from that sale to start the fund off, and you have inspired other people to make similar donations. What might be next?
AG: Well, to begin with, I hope I don’t have to sell another painting that I like so much. We don’t have much more of those that we can sell.
This story appears in the June/July 2018 issue of Town & Country. Subscribe Today
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