>> You also see a very strong counter-movement of artists and photographers who are activists who are using the camera as a weapon against oppression.

>> BOWEN: I'm Jared Bowen-- coming up on Open Studio, how photography brings America's incarceration crisis into focus.

Then, Our Daughters, Like Pillars.

It's a new play about what happens when someone outside the blood line crosses the line.

Plus, painter Christopher Volpe shows us Moby-Dick is very much a tale for our time.

>> I saw the parallel between the hubris of Ahab and the peril as we're tempting the gods with continued fossil fuel extraction.

>> BOWEN: And technology literally intersects with the time-old tradition of weaving to create contemporary textiles.

>> Coming in contact with this material and having it grow before your very eyes is amazing!

>> BOWEN: It's all now on Open Studio.

♪ ♪ First up, we visit Prison Nation.

That's the name of a photography exhibition at Wellesley College's Davis Museum.

It trains a lens on the imprisoned, offering a counterpoint to the notion of the criminal.

Our conceptions of incarceration have long been crafted by the camera, starting in the 19th century, when the advent of photography gave rise to the mugshot.

>> It was taken up by police and local and national and state agencies to basically create categories of people who were seen as suspects.

>> BOWEN: There are some two million people imprisoned in the United States today-- and they are overwhelmingly people of color.

It's why, this exhibition at Wellesley College's Davis Museum argues, the United States has become a Prison Nation.

Nicole Fleetwood is the curator.

>> There's a very long history of photography as photography being used as a tool to oppress marginalized populations.

And you also see a very strong, robust counter-movement of artists and photographers who are activists who are using the camera as a weapon against oppression.

>> BOWEN: As we find on these walls, they are photographers who, with rare access to prisons, focus beyond bars and uniforms to challenge our ideas of who is in prison.

In the 1970s and '80s, photographer Jack Lueders-Booth documented women inside MCI Framingham, a time when they could wear their own street clothes.

Amanda Gilvin is the Davis Museum's assistant director.

>> As he began photographing them and recording their oral histories, he realized how little he knew of them after all, as they told him of their traumatic pasts.

We see women who were insisting on self-creation of their own identity in these photographs, even under such challenging circumstances.

>> BOWEN: New identities are assumed and any sense of prison is completely banished in these portraits by Deborah Luster.

They're of inmates participating in a passion play.

>> They gaze back out at us in character.

But we are invited to engage with them as peers of a kind, and to see them in ways that we are generally prevented from seeing them.

They have been removed from civil society.

>> BOWEN: For the incarcerated who have been released after convictions ranging from drug dealing to gun selling, photographer Joseph Rodriguez explores newly found freedom.

>> The setting can be ambiguous, but speaks to how the experience of prison impacts people so far beyond the prison walls, the families and other loved ones of people who were incarcerated, but also people after incarceration who need to piece their lives together.

>> BOWEN: Prisons themselves have been a fascination of photographer Stephen Tourlentes.

From afar, his landscapes look like things of beauty, natural expanses emitting an enchanting glow.

On closer inspection, though, the glow is the light emitted from a so-called Wyoming death house: the state penitentiary.

>> It's a bit subversive in the sense of how I want to draw people into the conversation.

What I try to do is to not describe the prison in the way that people expect to see it.

And it's asking the viewer to think about these things that we keep on the edge of our consciousness.

>> BOWEN: Until they're at the edge of our neighborhoods.

>> I'm really interested in that idea of two worlds of time within a block of each other, that somebody can live in their home and not necessarily even...

They can just kind of block out what's down the block.

And that the people on that, that are incarcerated then also are sort of seeing daily life kind of pass by through the fence.

>> BOWEN: Passing glimpses inside prison are what partly spurred Nicole Fleetwood's drive to counter mass incarceration with projects like Prison Nation.

For years, she made annual visits to two incarcerated cousins.

>> I would sit across from them in the prison visiting room.

At the end of these visits, we would always take photographs.

Most prisons have a makeshift photo studio where visitors can take pictures with their incarcerated loved ones.

>> BOWEN: How significant are the backdrops that we see in those pictures?

>> Yeah.

There's often quite elaborate backdrops.

And these backdrops are usually of a kind of nature scape that are influenced from, you know, influenced by landscape painting and the like.

They're really meant to kind of suggest an unbounded space, a space that is the opposite of what a prison cell is.

>> BOWEN: And they reveal not just what life beyond bars might be, they also offer a glimpse into the inner life of people still behind bars.

Because as Fleetwood points out, the backdrops are often painted by incarcerated people.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Our Daughters, Like Pillars at the Huntington Theatre Company is a comedy about a vacationing family.

The playwright, Kirsten Greenidge, has a pretty extraordinary one of her own.

She's had plays produced around the country.

Her sister Kerri is an historian who wrote the prize-winning book Black Radical.

And her other sister Kaitlyn is a writer and novelist whose debut book, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, was a bestseller.

We're re-airing a conversation I had with the Greenidge sisters just days before the pandemic brought the world to a halt and delayed the opening of Our Daughters, Like Pillars-- until now.

Kirsten, Kerri, Kaitlyn Greenidge, thank you so much for being here.

So, this is hilarious, because, Kirsten, I've had you on the show before.

We, we know each other.

Then I met you, Kerri, and then you told me about Kaitlyn, and I thought, "What is in your cornflakes as children that you all grew up to have this success?"

But, so, Kirsten, I'll start with you.

Uh, how do you describe who your sisters are and the fact that you've all risen to these great heights already?

>> Um, well, my sisters are some of the best ladies I know.

I'm really excited to be related to them.

Um, they are, like, my partners in crime.

I have no idea what, what happened, except that we were, um, we just spent a lot of time together being creative in our living room, I think.

That's how part of it started a long time ago.

A lot of free time to write together, play together, and a lot of singing together.

>> Yes.

>> I think that's how it started.

>> BOWEN: You felt freedom, and I understand you were reading Pushkin and, and playing the cello.

>> Yes.

>> BOWEN: You, you, you were in it from a very early age, it sounds like.

>> Yeah, I think, I think we all were just very, um, um, into reading things.

My mother used to say, you know, "If you're bored, it's because you're boring.

So you shouldn't be bored, you should find something to do."

So I think we were just always encouraged to, uh, play together, to, um, do something instead of just kind of mope around.

>> BOWEN: Well, Kaitlyn, were there limits?

Or were you just given free rein as you were coming up?

>> Oh, uh, I mean, there were definitely limits.

I think the things that were given free rein were what we could, what kind of culture we could consume.

So, um, nothing was really off-limits.

Um, we could read whatever we like, or usually watch whatever we like, within reason, you know?

>> BOWEN: Well, you're all trailblazers in what you're doing.

Kirsten, I read that you, you didn't realize until a little bit later in life, until seeing an August Wilson play, that you could even be a playwright.

So, how, how did you find yourself?

>> That field trip where I went to go see August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone and thinking, "Oh, my gosh, that's what I am," and realizing that that had to come out of me, no matter what it was called, was really important.

Uh, and having, um, parents who, uh, allowed me to do that.

And said, "Yes, this is who you are, find a way to, to do that."

>> BOWEN: You've both had books selected as best books of the year in their respective years, you've had your plays, I mean, how, how do you interact with one another, support one another?

>> I'm just so, um, proud of my, my sisters and my, um, just my family in general.

Because I'm a historian, both of their creativity encourages me to be more creative in the history.

And so I'm also very inspired by stuff that they're doing.

Both of them are very tapped into culture and politics and reading, so any book they're reading, I'm, like, "Oh, I should be reading that.

>> BOWEN: How often do you talk?

>> Oh, I think, just, it's a constant conversation.

>> Exactly, yes.

>> It is a constant conversation.

I, it is almost...

I don't find it overwhelming at all.

Um, it, but it is, like, you know, a 6:00 a.m. text of, "Did you see this, did you hear this?"

And it, conversations, um, pick up and die down, uh, almost seamlessly.

I just figured out how to do, um, meld calls.

>> I know, we just figured it out.

>> That is great, because now we can all talk at the same time.

>> Yes.

>> On one telephone call without doing speaker.

>> BOWEN: Well, how free are you with each other to share ideas, to, to criticize-- constructive criticism?

>> I think we share ideas.

Someone asked me this recently, like, "Do you share work "and then pass work back and forth and, like, you know, edit people's work?"

We do not do that.

>> As children, we would pass things around.

>> Oh, yes.

>> And then we all went through a phase where we became very sensitive.

>> BOWEN: Ah.

>> And so I think there is, like, an unspoken thing that we then stopped passing things around that we...

But we always, I mean, I always know what everyone is kind of working on or looking at.

And so, the great thing is, like, Kaitlyn will say, "Oh, I'm reading this, researching this for my novel, and I read this."

And I'll be, like, "Oh," I'll then go and find it.

>> And our work overlaps a lot.

I'm in rehearsal now for a play.

An actor came up to me and said, "You know, your sister refers to the mother in, in her book this way."

So, it's really interesting how our work overlaps, but we don't, do not usually hand each other, um, um, proofs or galleys or something, and, and say, "Here, uh, "check this out and, and give me, red-line anything."

>> Yeah.

>> We haven't done that in a long time.

>> BOWEN: Well, you mentioned the play, which is Our Daughters, Like Pillars.

And this is about a family, over the weekend.

Are we to glean that you're writing about your own family?

>> No, it is, it is...

It, it draws from my life, but it was inspired by a book, uh, by Dorothy West called, uh, The Living is Easy.

And in it, sisters come and live together, and it's about that journey.

And, um, it's inspired a little bit by living together, but, but I think the sisters in that book, um, and in, in the play are a little bit different than us in that they are perhaps not as kind to each other, I would say, without giving way too much.

>> BOWEN: Hmm.

And Kaitlyn, you're a novelist, and, and you write nonfiction pieces, as we see in the New York Times, too.

How feel, how free do you feel to draw from the family and, and your experiences?

I mean, they always say, write what you know.

>> Yeah, uh, pretty free.

I mean, a couple of the pieces that I've done for the New York Times have, have been about either trips that we've taken together or about experiences that we've had as sisters.

Um, and I think probably just because of how we grew up, I'll always be interested in writing about that relationship in some sort of way.

>> BOWEN: So, we've seated you in birth order here.

Maybe I won't tell the audience in which order.

But does birth order matter in your family?

Do you, do you see things play out for that way?

>> We often sit in this order.

And people, people have said to my mom, like, "Did you know they are sitting in their birth order?"

So, it's, it's, it's, it's something that we've done, but done before.

I am the oldest, and I often, uh, can be quite bossy.

And that is okay with me, that's fine.

I will own that.

Um, and I think that's just... (laughing): As I look at Kerri staring at me.

That's just, that's just part of who I am in the, in this, in this family.

I think birth order, I don't think you can always escape that.

>> And I'm, I'm the middle one, so I think, you know, I think it's, uh...

I don't know, I think birth order definitely does matter.

I think it plays out in your relationships.

What's also been interesting to me is just seeing, like, the generational thing that you wouldn't think of, um... We're not that much older than Kaitlyn, but, um, you know, I'm four-and-a-half years older than Kaitlyn, and Kirsten's seven-and-a-half years?

>> You didn't have to call out ages.

>> Yeah, I know... >> What's wrong with you?

>> Um, but, but, so just to see, like, the slightly different perspective.

>> Yeah, they're Generation X, and I am a very old Millennial, so it's, like... (all laughing) >> And when we make fun of Millennials, Kaitlyn will be, like, "Well, I'm a Millennial," you know?

>> BOWEN: Well, it has been such a pleasure to have you all here and talk to you.

I've been wanting to do this ever since we met on that shoot.

>> I know.

>> BOWEN: I'm so delighted.

>> BOWEN: Kerri, Kaitlyn, Kirsten Greenidge, thank you all so much for being here.

>> Thank you.

>> Thanks for having us.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: One of the country's most esteemed dance companies is in town.

Alvin Ailey Dance Theater is among the highlights in Arts This Week.

Sunday night, hear from today's jazz legends.

Redman, Mehldau, McBride, and Blade reconvene at Symphony Hall to celebrate nearly three decades of their breakthrough jazz release "MoodSwing."

The history of segregation in swimming is examined in the collaborative exhibition Rights Along the Shore.

See it at the Boston Center for the Arts Wednesday.

Thursday, the famed Alvin Ailey Dance Theater returns to the Boch Center Wang Theatre for a performance of contemporary creations.

Phoebe Potts presents her one-woman show, Too Fat for China.

Follow her international quest to adopt at the Mosesian Center for the Arts Friday.

Boston's Fenway Studios opens its doors to the community for an afternoon of music, art, and more.

Visit artists Saturday.

♪ ♪ We are a nation that just can't quit Moby-Dick.

In a new series of paintings at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, painter Christopher Volpe shows us why.

He explores how Herman Melville's dark whale tale charted a course to today.

With the show wrapping up on May 8, we return to Volpe's work, which we first brought you in February.

The cobblestone streets still invite clatter, lamps continue to light the way, and clapboard buildings beckon as they always have.

This is the New Bedford from whence Herman Melville launched Moby-Dick.

>> It's a New England tale.

He talks about the damp, drizzly November of his soul.

There's always been a darker side to American art and literature, particularly in New England.

>> BOWEN: People still gather here every year in person or virtually for a marathon reading of the novel.

This year, actor Sam Waterston was Ishmael.

>> Why, upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you feel yourself such a mystical vibration when first told that you, and your ship, were now out of sight of land?

>> I think you can see Moby-Dick as a portrait of America and our worst impulses, and where they will take us if we don't rein them in.

>> BOWEN: Artist Christopher Volpe has painted a series of works that seemingly tear out of the novel's pages.

They're now on view at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, in an exhibition named after Moby-Dick's first chapter.

>> The title is Loomings, and it seemed an appropriate one for a, what's looming on the horizon.

You know, just the sense of, a sense of foreboding, hints that we're getting, hints of apocalypse.

>> BOWEN: Apocalyptic darkness swirls in these paintings, as Volpe charts Melville's course from the 19th century to the 21st, when the world's reliance on whale oil eventually gave way to petroleum.

>> I saw the parallel between the hubris of Ahab and the peril of America and the globe, as we're tempting the gods with continued fossil fuel extraction.

>> BOWEN: So what we find here-- these dark, ghostly images of ship, storm, and belching smoke-- are rendered not in black paint, but tar.

>> Both of these paintings started as fields of tar.

There's a couple of different ways that I can approach a painting.

One way is to just grab a big brush, and just begin making lines, making shapes, gestures.

The other is a subtractive method, sort of the opposite, where I'll coat a whole canvas with tar, and then go in and remove tar with rags, and look for the shapes within there.

>> BOWEN: And all while wearing a gas mask.

>> I have to wear a respirator, because it's pretty toxic.

>> BOWEN: Pretty great symbolism in the fact that you have to wear a mask as you're painting.

>> Yeah, yeah, and it's...

There's a great quote: "Art recycles a culture's toxins."

And literally I'm doing that, I'm taking this poisonous gunk, which wants to pull us down into dissolution and death, and I'm trying to invest it with beauty.

>> BOWEN: In college, Volpe was a poetry major who arrived at painting by way of his love for 19th-century landscapes, for all their beauty.

>> But that became problematic when I realized that, you know, nature is on the run.

I fell into what the poet Shelley said, that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

>> These paintings are like poetry, right?

They have a meter.

They have a moment that you kind of, you can move through and interpret.

>> BOWEN: Naomi Slipp is the museum's chief curator.

She says by design, we find Volpe's paintings in a gallery that looks out beyond the city's historic streets to a waterfront that once floated a whaling industry, and now a thriving fishing one.

>> And you see the docks and the ships and the kind of activity of the waterfront as it continues.

And then you can come into the exhibition spaces and hopefully find exhibits like Christopher's that speak to the larger challenges of addressing global warming, ocean warming, and marine mammal health.

>> BOWEN: It's a conversation that Herman Melville launched in 1851.

And, says Christopher Volpe, in his work, he's realized it's time we shape up or ship out.

>> Maybe it's time for a new kind of beauty, a beauty that doesn't sugarcoat the darker side of reality, but redeems it somehow by making it visible, and yet not repugnant, and allows us to see things we wouldn't ordinarily see, and to be able to deal with them in ways that maybe we haven't yet.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: For weaver Janice Lessman-Moss, the virtual meets the material.

As an artist, she puts the tech in textiles, using digital design to create works that defy our expectations of what a loom can do.

>> When I say that I'm a weaver, people generally assume that I am making garments or that I am making fabric for function, and it takes a while for me to convince them that in fact it is a medium, just like painting, that allows you to create abstract images for the wall, for contemplation, for, you know, visual enjoyment.

And it usually doesn't resonate so well until they see them, and then it makes sense.

Because they recognize that I can do all of the things that other people can do with other mediums with color, and with form, and with texture, but it happens with that intersection of thread.

I work digitally, I do all my designs digitally.

And I am interested in the kind of the mathematical aspects of working with geometric forms, and the count of threads in both directions.

I mean, I like that right-brain, left-brain kind of intersection that weaving allows.

They allude to my interest in walking.

And walking is very linear movement.

And weaving is a very linear process.

Walking allows you to kind of move forward, but also to kind of linger, it's a slow movement.

Weaving is a slow process-- I always call it a slow art.

It's a very slow art.

And when I am designing, I'm actually thinking of that same notion of movement.

Kind of following a path.

So I create a path on a template of circles, within squares, and I create these paths, and those paths end up being the kind of the contours or the outlines of shapes, and they create, sometimes they're just lines, and sometimes they establish shapes, and I put other patterns within those shapes, so everything kind of builds in that same systematic way, in a kind of ordered way.

And yet deviates from any kind of real plan.

It's just that it, it is ordered because of the nature of the structure.

Once I've done the design, the weaving process itself is really following through on that plan.

I feed it to the loom, and then the loom reads it, and then I press a button, and the threads are raised according to what I have programmed.

However...

I mean, it's like an architect, you know?

You're, you have some design, you know, you can visualize and you can see from your design, this is what's going to happen.

What actually happens is sometimes different.

And the whole experience of coming in contact with this material and having it grow before your very eyes, is amazing!

♪ ♪ I've been working with metal introduced into the weaving for years-- minimally.

Work that I did in the spring of 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, I started to put more and more metal into the weaving, which adds an element of shine.

And I felt, you know, in thinking about it, that it was this attempt to kind of create a sense of hope, you know, just have some little bright spots in my weaving.

They appear as you move around.

The weaving, you see this, the shine kind of emanating, and then it'll tuck back behind, so it's this sense of almost shadow and light, and I like that, that kind of surprise, that mystery.

And I started working with those smaller kind of orbs of, or circles of metal, and then I introduced...

This one is, I went kind of crazy with the introduction of the metal, because I just felt like I really wanted some light in there.

And I really love, in this piece, they almost look like little trails of, like, slug trails.

That kind of a wet trail that is illuminated depending on what the lighting is like.

And I love that it, it's so imperfect, that it has that sense of organic movement that is more like nature.

You learn so much every time you make something.

You see something that, that maybe you didn't think about before, and...

It's a very satisfying journey.

I mean, you're going through life and you're able to make these visual statements, pieces that you hope other people enjoy looking at and finding meaning in.

Whether they see what I see in it isn't totally relevant.

The work is directed by personal, you know, interest and inspiration.

But people may look at it, they bring other histories to the engagement with the colors and the engagement with the relationship of lines, and they might say, "Oh, it looks like this, it looks like that.

It reminds of me of this," and I said, "Okay, well, good.

"If you're looking at it "and you're taking the time to think about it, I'm happy about that, I'm grateful for that."

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: And that is all for this edition of Open Studio.

Next week, playwright Matthew López on his Tony-winning drama The Inheritance, and arriving at 1980s gay life by way of the novel Howards End.

>> That was the first time I saw a movie that was so different from the world that I knew that still somehow spoke to me in some way.

>> BOWEN: Plus, an Iranian artist frames freedom in her paintings.

As always, you can visit us online at GBH.org/OpenStudio.

And you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter, @OpenStudioGBH.

I'm @TheJaredBowen.

We leave you now with the photography of Martin Parr.

On view now at Boston College's McMullen Museum of Art, Parr's work documents some 40 years of evolution in Ireland.

I'm Jared Bowen, thanks for joining us.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪